Stakeholders with an interest in content or digital works create business models which are associated by virtue of their position in a hierarchy. This positioning often corresponds to the structure of collections of content or digital works. When these are requested, business model reconciliation occurs by consulting the relevant sibling, descendant or ascendant business models, taking information from them and resolving conflicts between them to construct composite business models. Also taking into account stand-alone business models covering special cases such as loose content bundles, the resulting composite business models determine content access conditions plus the levying and distribution of fees between the participating stakeholders. The invention has applications in various forms of publishing, ticketing and document-based e-commerce.
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