Abstract: A system and method are disclosed for managing the display or the printing of a copyright notice or security label for a soft copy document, so as to provide appropriate security for the document as desired by its author. A special copyright notice can be displayed on the first page or predetermined pages of the document as it is displayed on a display screen. If a printer is connected to the system and commanded to print the document, a cover page will be printed which includes the copyright notice, before the rest of the document is printed. If a "Do Not Copy" label is included in the soft copy of the structured document, any printer command, write to disk command, or telecommunication command will be aborted, thereby giving effect to the author's desired restriction not to copy the document.

Abstract: A method of informing a user of a data processing system about which of his previous selections in a current data processing session have disabled, or otherwise "affected", selections which would ordinarily be selectable. Control of the data processing system is managed by listing the selections available to the user on series of menus presented on the display means. A CPU instructs the display means to display the menu which corresponds to that particular point in the program. Following the method of the present invention, the CPU has kept track of the selections made by user. By referring to a special data file which correlates or compares these past selections to the list of actions displayed in the current menu, the CPU determines which of these actions are "affected". These affected actions are then denoted on the menu in some way, e.g., changing the affected action's color, marking the affected actions with a special symbol, etc.