According to one embodiment of the present invention, a method for tracking the usage of digital content is provided. The method includes tracking the usage of at least one digital content by having a provider computer system prepare the content in an encoded format and allowing the provider computer system to distribute the content to a user computer system. The user computer system is made to generate at least one usage tracking message in response to the usage of the content by the user computer system in a uniform, fine-grained and format independent way. The user computer system is enabled to report the usage tracking message to the provider computer system. The provider computer system verifies the usage tracking message.