Patent 7953718 was granted and assigned to Sony on May, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A UMID extracting/embedding unit 10 extracts UMID data embedded in material data. A CPU 11 updates a generation indicated by generation data in the extracted UMID data to generate new generation data when processing accompanied by a deterioration of quality is applied to the material data such as recording to a database 8. The UMID extracting/embedding unit 10 embeds the new generation data in the material data.