Methods, devices and computer program products facilitate conditional access to a content embedded with watermarks. For such a content, when copy control rules associated with an embedded watermark message prohibits unconditional access to the content, it is determined whether or not an exception to the copy control rules exists, and if an exception to the copy control rules exists, the content is conditionally accessed. Additional watermark messages can be extracted while the content is being conditionally accessed, and based on the additionally extracted watermark messages, it is verified that conditional access to the content has been fulfilled.