Development of innovative mechanisms for protection of Intellectual Property (IP) is a necessary and important activity in modern computing systems. Many parties participate in creation and distribution of protected property, such as creators, distributors, manufacturers, vendors, providers and the end-users. There have been various mechanisms for IP protection deployed already, but we need to reconsider some of them or deploy new ones, taking in advantage new trends and technologies. Embedded systems can be used as means to protect IP and implement DRM mechanisms into larger general purpose systems or into mobile consumer devices, like PDAs, mobile phones and mobile players, which are quite constrained environments. In this paper, we investigate and summarize existing methods to protect IP with the use of embedded systems.