Patent ID: 6910630

Claim:
An improvement for protecting content, comprising: a user computer, of an user, having a stored address; a smart card having a smart-card address, with the smart-card address equal to the stored address of the user computer; any of a compact disk or a storage medium, having the content to be sold to the user; an encoder, remotely located from the user computer, for encoding, using the smart-card address from the smart card, the content from any of the compact disk or the storage medium, thereby generating encoded content; a header subsystem for adding a header to the encoded content, thereby generating header-encoded content; disk-writing means for writing the header-encoded content, on an encoded disk; a header detector, located at the user computer, for detecting the header from header-encoded content on the encoded disk, thereby generating a detected header; a user smart-card reader, located at the user computer, for reading the smart-card address from the smart card; a verifier subsystem, located at the user computer, for verifying the smart-card address read from the smart card with the stored address at the user computer, and responsive to the smart-card address matching the stored address, for generating a verification signal; and a decoder, responsive to the verification signal and responsive to the detected header, for decoding, using either the smart-card address or the stored address, the encoded content embedded in the header-encoded content from the encoded disk.