Multimedia fingerprinting is an effective technique to trace the sources of pirate copies of copyrighted multimedia information. Separable codes can be used to construct fingerprints resistant to the averaging collusion attack on multimedia contents. In this paper, we investigate -separable codes from a combinatorial point of view. We first derive several upper bounds on the sizes of -separable codes, and then turn our attention to the constructions of optimal -separable codes with short length. Two infinite families of optimal -separable codes of length 2 are constructed from projective planes, and all optimal -separable codes of length 3 are explicitly constructed by means of difference matrices. These optimal -separable codes with short length can be used to construct good -separable codes with long length by a known composition construction.