Abstract: A method for protecting data recorded on an original data storage medium against unauthorized copying includes receiving data encoded in accordance with an applicable recording standard, and altering a portion of the encoded data such that the altered data are identified as erroneous according to the standard. The data are recorded on the medium, together with ancillary data which are used by a processor in an intended application of the medium to operate upon the altered portion of the data such that the application runs in a manner substantially unaffected by the alteration of the data. Upon unauthorized copying of the data, however, the ancillary data are ineffective in correcting the altered portion of the encoded data, so that the alteration causes a substantially unrecoverable error in an unauthorized copy of the original medium.

Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided in which the exchange of data between businesses is facilitated by an electronic interface that comprehends the data mapping and translation requirements of disparate computer application systems. An electronic commerce appliance tracks the data exchanged between an initiator system and a recipient system and determines whether to map, translate, or reject the data before transmitting to or upon receipt by the recipient system. The electronic commerce appliance makes the determination whether to map, translate, or reject data based upon data mapping requirements posted to a data mapping database accessible by both the initiator and recipient systems via the Internet or other communications network.

Abstract: Data is secured in a computer network to transparently establish and manage a separation of user-based communities of interest based upon cryptographically separated, need to know, security levels. Data from a source document, data object or data stream is filtered to form subsets of extracted data and remainder data based upon security levels for the communities. Extracts are stored in assigned memories. Full or partial plaintext reconstruction is permitted only in the presence of assigned security clearance for the community of the inquiring party. Encryption, corresponding to security levels, establishes separation of secured data. The information processing system uses a data filter to extract security sensitive words, data objects, etc., a distributed storage system and a compiler is used to reconstruct plaintext based on security clearance. Multiple level encryption in one document is also available.