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.