Researchers have devised the direct feature-based method to improve traditional digital watermarking whilst developing the copyright protection scheme. A discussion on various multimedia copyright protection schemes based on the direct feature-based method (e.g., image, audio, text document, geospatial data, and relational databases) follows. In conclusion, the authors show that a good copyright protection scheme should not only be robust enough to endure acceptable manipulations, but also secure enough to withstand malicious attacks. In addition, the direct feature-based method can be considered a viable solution to the trade-off between data payload, fidelity, and robustness.