This paper presents a novel method for the protection of copyrighted multimedia content. The problem of selective encryption (SE) has been addressed alongwith compression for the state of the art video codec H.264/AVC. SE is performed in the context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) module of video codec. For this purpose, CABAC is converted to an encryption cipher. It has been achieved through scrambling of equal length binarized code words. In our scheme, CABAC engine serves the purpose of encryption cipher without affecting the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC by keeping exactly the same bitrate and by generating completely compliant bitstream, and requires insignificant computational cost. Nine different benchmark video sequences containing different combinations of motion, texture and objects are used for experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm.