This thesis hypothesizes that enhanced attribution, a new approach to digital rights management that links multimedia content elements with complete, readily available, secure copyright data, will address the problems of content identification and rights acquisition in the production environment. Realizing that users often require access to ownership information and licensing services while the content is in use, the enhanced attribution approach allows such information to be retrieved and services accessed from within the context of the document or project in which the content is being used. The result is a system that strikes a balance between pay-per-use solutions and not using protection at all, adding "flexibility and openness to the traditional rules of exchange, without forcing (publishers) to simply abandon their works in cyberspace and hope for the best."$ sp1$ ftn$ sp1$Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, Vol.10, No. 11 (July 8, 1996).