Patent ID: 8239682

Claim:
A method for transmitting electronic documents over a communications network, wherein digital rights of access for each of said electronic documents are cryptographically managed and secured, comprising: on a computer system comprising at least one computer, installing an authoring tool for generating and distributing cryptocontainers comprising said electronic documents, wherein said authoring tool includes a public key belonging to a key server and a public key belonging to said authoring tool; on the computer system, authenticating an author of a cryptocontainer with a certificate issued by an authenticating server, wherein an author license is created and stored with said authoring tool; wherein said author license comprises an email address of said author and a hardware fingerprint encrypted together with said public key of said key server signed by a private key of said key server; entering, by the computer system, an e-mail address for each of a plurality of recipients into a recipient list of said cryptocontainer in said authoring tool; generating, by the authoring tool, a symmetric session key for said recipient list; encrypting, by the authoring tool, said symmetric session key for said recipient list in said cryptocontainer together with said public key belonging to said key server; adding, by the authoring tool, said electronic documents to said cryptocontainer, wherein for each recipient on said recipient list a usage rights timeline is generated for each of said electronic documents; encrypting, by the authoring tool, said cryptocontainer comprising said encrypted symmetric session key for said recipient list, together with said electronic documents, and together with each of said usage rights timelines, wherein said cryptocontainer enables said encrypted symmetric session key for said recipient list to be individually decrypted from said cryptocontainer; transmitting, by the authoring tool, said cryptocontainer over a communications network to each of said plurality of recipients in said recipient list of said cryptocontainer; and wherein the transmitting is performed via email using the email address of the author and the email address for each of the plurality of recipients.