Methods for rights enabled peer-to-peer networking

The present invention relates to digital rights management (400). In one embodiment, persons processes and/or computers (420) and appliances (416) locate, share, publish retrieve and use all kinds of digital technologies. Rights management includes securely associating rules for authorized rules with the digital information. Rules and/or digital information may be encapsulated in a cryptographically secure data structure or container (CSC) (832) 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 (816) 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) (832).