Contract and rights management - and thus property rights protection - has gained increasing importance as a quality standard in brokerage and electronic commerce environments. Contract and rights management provides information on the legal relationships associated with digital assets, as well as intellectual property rights protection and the enforcement of rights. However, many brokerage and e-commerce platforms currently in operation were not originally designed to support contract and rights management. In this context, we identify open issues in digital contract and rights management and present a framework design to resolve these issues. This framework uses standardized XML-based rights expression languages, reuses an existing role-based access control component for rights enforcement, and is extensible with value-added service components for rights management. The reference project for our work is a (heterogeneous) P2P network of interacting brokerage platforms for learning resources.