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a customer who buys and reads a wide range of consulting company reports on a subject may determine that six of them are particularly useful and that packaging those six together provides added value (e.g., saving someone else the time and effort of finding them). The customer packages those six reports in his own secure digital container, with his own set of rules (e.g., prices) for access. Importantly, those rules are over and above the rules specified by each of the individual reports, which remain "enclosed" in their own (sub)containers. Someone who buys the collection must obtain (i.e., pay for) all necessary rights, including the rights to the collection, and the rights to any of the individual reports. Super-distribution thus enables a chain of value-adding activities, while respecting the rights and restrictions imposed by all the content owners.

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products. Earlier uses of the term referred to the distribution of software that metered its use ("meterware"). See, for example, Cox (1994), which describes the approach of Ryoichi Mori of the Japan Electronics Industry Development Association. This work suggested adding a special (tamper-resistant) processor to computers and special instructions in the software to track and bill for use (a system much like the one envisioned for videos with Divx). The interesting suggestion is that where software is currently sold by the copy (and digital copies are difficult to track or control), copies should instead be given away, and only usage should be billed (based in part on the claim that use is easier to track than copying). Mori's work also suggested the possibility of layers of such pay-per-use as different programs call on one another, an idea similar to the notion of superdistribution used above.