Do you own any disks containing sensitive or copyrighted content? If so, do you worry that someone could illegally copy and use that information?

Adobe and Iomega have teamed up to answer this common concern with a secure digital delivery system that prevents unauthorized distribution of Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) files stored on portable media.

Adobe is helping publishers, distributors, retailers, and consumers to exchange electronic content securely by tying the use of that content to specific types of portable media and hardware. Iomega, manufacturer of the popular Zip disk, has encoded every portable Zip, Jaz, and Clik disk with a unique serial number. The serial numbers are stored in a part of the disk that is inaccessible to end users, so the numbers cannot be modified.

As part of a new cooperative alliance, Adobe is licensing code from Iomega that lets Adobe's Web Buy software extract the serial number from any Iomega disk, and use that number as a component of Adobe's encryption system. That makes Iomega's disks function as secure portable storage devices.

The two technologies work together to emulate the way we use physical books today. "Instead of sharing your paperback or your document, you'll be able to share your disk, but only one person at a time will be able to read that 'book,'" says Germaine Ward, vice president of software solutions at Iomega Corporation.