Patent ID: 7996486

Claim:
A system for managing rights to digital content, the system comprising: a digital rights management (DRM) server operable to maintain, in a central location, content publisher accounts for a plurality of content publishers that publish digital content and consumer accounts for a plurality of consumers, the DRM server being further operable to communicate with the content publishers to DRM-encrypt their digital content using their content publisher accounts and to issue rights to DRM-decrypt said digital content to one or more consumers accordingly via their consumer accounts, wherein the content publisher accounts include rights templates that set predefined rights limitations to the digital content, and wherein a rights template for accessing DRM-encrypted digital content is consumer-selectable, the DRM server operable to grant to a consumer rights specified in a rights template selected by the consumer by creating a copy of the selected rights template as a rights instance that is accessible to the consumer via a consumer account of the consumer, and wherein the DRM server is operable for a first content publisher, through its content publisher account on the centralized DRM server and in accordance with a cross-publisher rights management policy, to grant rights to one of the consumers, via the consumer's consumer account on the centralized DRM server, for DRM-decrypting digital content of a second content publisher, said digital content of the second content publisher having been DRM-encrypted using the second content publisher's content publisher account on the centralized DRM server.