Abstract: 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.