Patent ID: 8464066

Claim:
A computer-implemented system for sharing data segments of multimedia data, the computer-implemented system comprising: a computing device interface configured to receive a request to share a data segment of multimedia data, wherein the amount of data in the data segment is less than a total amount of data in the multimedia data, and wherein the request includes a segment identifier (ID) and a destination ID; and a computing device processing unit configured to: receive, from the computing device interface, the request to share the data segment; determine, based at least in part on metadata associated with the data segment, whether to grant permission to share the data segment corresponding to the segment ID with a destination corresponding to the destination ID, wherein the metadata includes: a digital rights management (DRM) policy, information about the destination, information about a user associated with the destination, a sum of the amount of data in the data segment, and tracking amounts of data in other data segments that were previously requested from the multimedia data; and granting permission to share the data segment with the destination and with successive recipients when: the sum is less than a predetermined threshold amount of data in the multimedia data, and the sum divided by the total amount of data in the multimedia data is less than a predetermined threshold percentage.