METHODS FOR RIGHTS ENABLED PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKING

摘要

The present invention relates to digital rights management. In one embodiment, persons, processes, and/or computers and appliances locate, share, publish, retrieve, and use all kinds of digital information that has been protected using digital rights management technologies. Rights management includes securely associating rules for authorized use with the digital information. Rules and/or digital information may be encapsulated in a cryptographically secure data structure or "container" ("CSC") to protect against unauthorized use, to ensure secrecy, to maintain integrity, and to force the use of a rights management system to access the protected information. Attributes or metadata information describing at least some of the rules ("rules-metadata information") and optionally any associated rule parameter data with respect to the protected information are created. This rules-metadata information may be organized, structure, encoded, and/or presented using a self-defining data structure such as those created using Extensible Markup Language (XML). In one embodiment, the XML-encoded rules-metadata information is also made available unencrypted, in plain text, to facilitate P2P search and file transfer. Having at least some of the rules-metadata information outside or external to a CSC allows greater flexibility in searching based at least in part upon the rules-metadata information. Some embodiments may hold the rules-metadata information in a separate CSC. Putting the rules-metadata information in a separate CSC more easily allows authentication and maintains the integrity of the rules-metadata information. In another embodiment, the rules metadata may be in an unencrypted portion of a CSC itself or concatenated with a CSC in a single file.