Patent ID: 8145572

Claim:
An information processing apparatus comprising: a first storage unit that stores composite contents data hierarchically formed of a plurality of content data, the plurality of content data being individually usable; a second storage unit that stores a plurality of usage rules defined for each usage type and a conflict solution policy, the usage rules individually defining conditions for verifying a grant/denial of use for each of the content data, the conflict solution policy defining a determination method of verifying the grant/denial of use; a first receiving unit that receives a designation of a specific content data from among the content data forming the composite contents data; a second receiving unit that receives an input a usage type of the specific content data; a first verifying unit that individually reads, for each of the content data forming the composite contents data containing the specific content data, a usage rule corresponding to the usage type received by the second receiving unit from among the usage rules stored in association with the content data, and verifies the grant/denial of use for the each content data based on the read usage rule; a second verifying unit that verifies which of the content data is available based on the determination method of the conflict solution policy associated with the each content data, when the results of the verification performed by the first verifying unit reveal that there is a conflict among the content data; a conflict solving unit that generates structural information indicating a hierarchical relation between content data verified as being available by the second verifying unit, based on the hierarchical relation between the content data forming the composite contents data; and a generating unit that generates partial granted content data hierarchically formed of the content data verified as available by the second verifying unit, based on the structural information, wherein the conflict solution policy defines, as the determination method of verifying the grant/denial of use, any one of full agreement requiring all the content data included in the composite contents data to satisfy the usage rules, lineal-line agreement requiring the content data received by the second receiving unit and content data of upper and lower levels than the content data to all satisfy the usage rules, lower-level component full agreement requiring the content data received by the second receiving unit and the content data of the lower levels than the content data to all satisfy the usage rules, and lower-level component agreement granting use of content data that satisfy the usage rules from among the content data received by the second receiving unit and the content data of the lower levels than the content data.