One of the prime reasons movie and music studios have ignored the Internet for open-networked multimedia content delivery, has been the lack of a technology that can support a secure digital rights management (DRM) system on a general purpose computer. The difficulty of building an effective multimedia DRM stems from the fact that traditional cryptographic primitives such as encryption or scrambling do not protect audio or video signals once they are played in plain-text. This fact, commonly referred to as “the analog hole,” has been responsible for the popularity of multimedia file sharing which cannot be controlled, at least technically, by content’s copyright owners. In this paper, we explore multimedia fingerprinting as an answer to “the analog hole” problem. We propose a new phase-shifted spread-spectrum fingerprinting paradigm particularly tailored for fast detection. Next, we present two techniques for fast maximum-likelihood audio and video synchronization design...