Re: Comments on MicroPayments and the Web
From: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
I think it would be interesting to see how copyright law will be applied to the Web if micropayments ever become popular. Would memory or disk caching be considered fair use? If so, then people could just set up a very large disk cache and maybe delete it every month or so. It would also be a pretty neat hack to use a proxy that only cached pages that charged micropayments. Companies would not make a lot of money from things like this. If disk caching was not considered to be fair use, people would still turn it on anyway.
Where does the money come from to run this proxy? Consider two sites, one which acts as a proxy and cache but which charges something under a penny per page, and another which acts for free. Won't the for-pay site be able to afford a larger disk, more servers, and better net connections? It will be a superior service. Micropayments will allow new services and improved quality over what we have today where we have to rely on charity and advertising as motivations for much of what we find on the web. Hal
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, Hal wrote:
Where does the money come from to run this proxy?
Consider two sites, one which acts as a proxy and cache but which charges something under a penny per page, and another which acts for free. Won't the for-pay site be able to afford a larger disk, more servers, and better net connections? It will be a superior service.
Micropayments will allow new services and improved quality over what we have today where we have to rely on charity and advertising as motivations for much of what we find on the web.
Who says that such a proxy needs to be run on a different machine? For UNIX users with a SLIP/PPP connection, it is trivial to run a web proxy that could be pointed to by web browser. I believe that this is also possible for Mac and Windoze users. The point of the proxy is not to keep the user's username or hostname anonymous, so it does not necessarily need to run on a seperate host. - -- Mark =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm@voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xe3bf2169 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 "In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." -- Friedrich Nietzsche -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMcNXibZc+sv5siulAQFghAP/Ru/+82shqQ4GTNpXiMzjdyRQG3JAYJXz WEf0tYjdTjIGrBYVbj+ECGsxBe+QXGCQSUrsDx6kVjjUVJ72P9TOccbFJ58EzXOc YlVIx17kgAN959fnamU8NLd8cvPDwCvevGKnsQzh5nLuwgKx+6Gu22BmFKazfpJZ Ihei1V9upuQ= =yXZl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (2)
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Hal -
Mark M.