Patent ID: 7058284

Claim:
A universal optical disc player, comprising: a disc drive with associated drive controller; a processor coupled to said drive controller; signal processing circuitry coupled to said processor and having an output port for coupling to a media presentation device; a memory coupled to said processor having a data structure defined therein; said data structure comprising an operating system having an associated virtual machine that provides an environment to host an auto-run playback program obtained from an optical disc placed in said disc drive; said operating system and said auto-run playback program executing under said operating system to collectively-provide control instructions to said processor to cause said processor to access media content from said optical disc and supply said media content to said signal processing circuitry for output to said media presentation device, wherein said media content includes an embedded active agent program and said auto-run playback program interacts with said active agent program to effect copy protection by altering media playback procedure.