On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Of course the easy answer is that the market will decide. But when you're trying to design the mechanisms then you have to anticipate the market's needs. You have to predict what the market will decide.
I.e. you have to predict what the people want. Sane engineering, wouldn't you say?
Unfortunately, the realistic answer seems to be that many possible patterns of payment will be desired by the market. In some cases providers of data will pay others to read it: advertising, political or persuasive arguments, reputation-building essays. In other cases people who want the data will pay those who provide it: music and other arts, entertaining and informative works.
After which the one who gets the proportions right wins the game. The others follow suit as soon as they can predict/acknowledge that their prediction wasn't as accurate as it could have been. It's called competition. Where's the problem? You seem to be forgetting the costs of setting up the service in the first place. If you factor those in, the producers certainly should be on the receiving end. OTOH, prices should be dynamic (derived from what is actually happening inside the system), and should always permit negative values as well, to account for unexpected flows of income. I think this is what you're after, basically. One shouldn't determine beforehand who pays who, even if the rates themselves are floating.
Ideally the publisher should be able to pay the author for the work.
This is true, also. Price discovery is something not easily implemented algorithmically. Perhaps MN should bill the services differentially based on demand and blocks reserved? If there was a more lucrative author to be served, the author whose blocks are currently being stored would have to pay? Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2