Owing to the advances in digital and networking technologies, media is now usually created, recorded, stored and distributed in the digital form. Sometimes digital media needs to be protected from unauthorized usage/ distribution and sometimes it is to be used as evidence in the court of law. However, media in digital form is neither safe from unauthorized distributions nor can be automatically considered as being authentic. Digital media can be easily replicated and distributed through networks or through stored media. They can be easily edited using digital media editing tools and thus the evidence can be forged. Thus protecting digital media against unauthorized copying and distribution as well as detecting forgery using forensics techniques are of great importance and challenge in media research.

Like media content, software protection has also recently attracted tremendous commercial interest, from major software vendors to content providers including the movie and music recording industries. Software security and protection play an important role in software engineering. Attacks such as piracy, reverse engineering and tampering can exploit the weaknesses of poorly protected software. Hence, it is vital to develop techniques for threat analysis, evaluation standards, metrics and new software protection mechanisms that can protect software from various threats and attacks.

Media and software protection techniques are intended to protect the rights of the owners in scenarios in which the participants often have conflicting goals and interests. This adversarial situation introduces many interesting new twists on classical problems in security. This special issue on Media Content and Software Protection is intended to bring forth the recent advancements in this area. Original and unpublished contributions covering and not limited to the following and related issues concerned with media content and software protection are solicited:
• Digital Rights Management
• Digital Watermarking
• Encryption Mechanisms for Media and Software Protection
• Security Mechanisms for Surveillance Data
• Multimedia and Software Ownership, Identification and Filtering
• Digital Content Fingerprinting and Near Copy Detection
• Copyright Protection of Text, Audio, Image, Video, Graphics and Ebooks
• Digital Content Protection in Social Networks and Peer-to-Peer Networks
• Digital Media Forensics: Forgery Detection and Device Characterization & Identification
• Software Watermarking
• Software Obfuscation Techniques
• Software Protection Based on Virtual Machine
• Software Protection Metrics and Measurements
• Platform Dependency and Impact on Software Protection Techniques
• Software Protection on Evolving Platforms
• Software Protection Supporting Technologies
• Trusted Hardware Approaches for Media and Software Protection