Patent 7359517 was granted and assigned to Adobe Inc. on April, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A document access control scheme uses digital “skeleton keys” to distribute access permissions for encrypted documents in a manner that does not require that rights management files (RMFs) be associated with each document. Multiple skeleton keys can be issued for the same document. The skeleton keys themselves can be opened by one or more other skeleton keys for different levels of document access.