Patent ID: 8437618

Claim:
An apparatus capable of mounting a recording medium for recording content data, the apparatus comprising: an information acquisition section that acquires protection information from a server, wherein the protection information indicates whether or not content data supplied from the server needs to be protected; a protection determination section that determines whether or not the content data needs to be protected according to the protection information acquired by the information acquisition section; an ID-prerecorded medium determination section that searches a plurality of recording media mounted on the apparatus and selects a recording medium which is prerecorded with a unique identification code which uniquely identifies the recording medium, thereby determining the unique identification code for use in protecting the content data, the ID-prerecorded medium determination section, when the ID-prerecorded medium determination section has checked one recording medium and the checked one recording medium is prerecorded with no unique identification code, determining whether all of the recording media are searched or not, and checking another recording medium when the ID-prerecorded medium determination section determines that not all of the recording media have been searched; a recording destination settling section that operates when the protection determination section determines that the content data needs to be protected and when the ID-prerecorded medium determination section selects the recording medium having the unique identification code, for settling the recording medium having the unique identification code to be a content recording destination; a data acquisition section that acquires content data from the server; an encryption section that operates when the data acquisition section acquires the content data which is to be protected, for encrypting the content data using the determined unique identification code; and a data recording section that records the content data encrypted by the encryption section in the recording medium settled to be the content recording destination by the recording destination settling section, and that operates when content data acquired by the data acquisition section need not be protected, for recording the acquired content data without encryption thereof in any of the plurality of recording media mounted on the apparatus regardless of having a unique identification code.