The disclosed technology can mitigate the risk of infringing a content owner's rights in legally-protectable content by operating as a trusted, third-party license authority between content owners and content users to ensure that a license governing at least some aspects of the protectable content is authentic and thus validly represents the restrictions imposed by content owners pertaining to the use, distribution, modification, combination, interaction, and/or other manipulation of such content. An identifier representative of the protectable content together with a profile of the license (which may include attributes that specify particular restrictions, uses, and interactions pertaining to the protectable content) can serve as a basis for determining the authenticity of the license associated with the protectable content. The protectable content can correspond to one or more multimedia presentations, video segments, audio segments, textual representations, works of art, visual representations, technological know-how, business know-how, contract rights, and/or software elements.