US Patent 7080039 Associating content with households using smart cards

Media content is associated with households using smart cards. The media content is encrypted and/or decrypted based on a household identifier corresponding to a smart card. Media content is encrypted such that it can only be decrypted with the same (or similar) smart card. Thus, the encrypted media content can be safely transferred within a computing device, stored, transferred to other computing devices, etc. because it cannot be decrypted without the smart card.