The copy attack is an attack on certain digital watermarking systems proposed by M. Kutter, S. Voloshynovskiy, and A. Herrige in a paper presented in January, 2000 at the Photonics West SPIE convention. The copy attack is an attack on certain digital watermarking systems proposed by M. Kutter, S. Voloshynovskiy, and A. Herrige in a paper presented in January, 2000 at the Photonics West SPIE convention. In some scenarios, a digital watermark is added to a piece of media such as an image, film, or audio clip, to prove its authenticity. If a piece of media were presented and found to lack a watermark, it would be considered suspect. Alternatively, a security system could be devised which would limit a user's ability to manipulate any piece of media which contained a watermark. For instance, a DVD burner may prohibit making copies of a film which contained a watermark.