As the commerce backbone for the enhanced FT.com, eRights is enabling the sale of two levels of subscription packages, which offer business analysis, research, and intelligence services. eRights makes possible the management of the customers, products, subscriptions, and billing necessary for FT.com to facilitate the sale of digital content on the business Web site.

"eMeta is enabling us to improve our already excellent Web offerings," said Zach Leonard, FT.com's chief operating officer. "By allowing us to provide an assortment of premium content at multiple subscription levels, we cannot only continue to satisfy the 2.7 million unique users we currently have, but also attract new users with a powerful blend of premium and free data. The business model for online news and data used to be built around either advertising or subscription revenues. Our business model combines the best of both approaches."

eRights is an enterprise-information commerce software package for the online information industry. It provides authentication, access control, and commerce.According to the announcement, these features enable eMeta customers to implement sophisticated personalized licenses and allow organizations to extract products from large databases of information.

eRights directly addresses the problems of selling and distributing information online by recognizing that information products are built from elements of content and application services that can be packaged in different ways to address different markets. eRights optimizes the many paths and usage terms and makes user, access, and product information available to other components of content distribution systems, such as personalization and content management software, content protection technologies, and payment systems.

Source: eMeta Corp., New York, 800/804-0103; http://www.emeta.com.