The protection of data against illicit transfer with respect to specific
data can be ensured. An integrated receiver decoder determines whether or
not ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) data requiring
authentication is contained in selected piece-of-music data in accordance
with determination data added into transmitted data. When ATRAC data
requiring authentication is contained, the integrated receiver decoder
performs an authentication process between it and a storage which is a
transfer destination of the ATRAC data, and performs downloading of the
ATRAC data after confirming that the storage is a valid apparatus to which
the downloading may be performed.
