A new buyer-seller watermarking protocol is proposed by applying a double encryption method and a novel mechanism of embedding a buyer's watermark. The protocol can effectively prevent against collusion attacks and the man in the middle attack if the third party is not trusted. Also, based on the proposed scheme for the first-hand transaction, a new buyer-reseller watermarking protocol and a formal multi-party watermarking protocol are also proposed. The proposed buyer-resell watermarking protocol only needs the original seller to provide transfer certificate and encryption-decryption service to support the second-hand transaction, and the multi-party watermarking protocol with distributed certificate authorities can overcome the difficulty in the combination of multicast mechanism with multiple unique watermarks and allow a seller to multicast the watermarked digital contents and key transaction information to n buyers. Furthermore, the idea of zero knowledge proof is also applied into the proposed scheme to allow the seller to take an effective control on the task performed by the third party.
