-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ To: Perry's Crypto List, Cypherpunks ## Date: 11/01/97 ## Subject: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol ] I've been working on various copyright protection schemes from time to time over the last three years. The general goal is (naturally enough) to make some digital data hard to copy without some kind of permission or payment or record being made. Thus, a user may have a book (mostly text, perhaps with some illustrations) he is reading on his computer, and the publisher wants to make sure that that user can't give copies of the book to all his friends, or post it to the net, or whatever. I'm convinced that there will never be a secure solution to this problem. (I can't imagine that this is news to anyone on these two lists.) I have somewhat mixed feelings about this--I'd hate to see my favorite authors and musicians either waiting tables for a living, or having to insert references to their sponsors' products in their stories. (``And then he bought her a Coke, and her eyes lit up.'') On the other hand, a widespread copyright commerce system that really works is most of the infrastructure for a massive censorship mechanism. (Reset the price of books you don't like to a billion dollars US per copy made.) Suppose I want to get paid for the next chapter of my thrilling novel. A whole bunch of people want to see me publish my next chapter. So, I make some statement like ``When I get $1,000 in donations, I will publish the next chapter in this novel.'' Readers can go to my website, see how much further there is to go, and donate money to the cause of getting my novel out. Note that I, the author, don't care *who* pays to get the next chapter out; nor do I care about free riders. Instead, I just care that my $1,000 pot gets filled. When it does, I publish the next chapter. There are basically three things that can go wrong here: a. I set my price too high, and never reach my amount. (It might be possible to decrease the total amount required later, though it would be a little questionable to do this often.) b. I set my price too low, and get lots less than I could have gotten. (This is self-correcting.) c. I get my amount filled, but still don't publish the next chapter of my novel. The trust issues, especially with (c), are worth considering. The obvious (clunky) way to solve this is to have a trusted third party handle the whole transaction. We will call him the Publisher. Now, I submit my novel, or parts of it, to the Publisher. He has his editors review it to see if it's worth trying to sell (like any publisher, albeit with rather low printing/binding costs). If so, he and I agree on a price and split. For unknown authors, the first several chapters, or even the first few books, may be freely available, in hopes of drawing in customers. For known authors, perhaps the first chapter or two is free, and the rest go through the payment mechanism. He has my whole novel, and on his web site, he makes available, say, chapters 1-3 for free, and chapter 4 will become available when $1000 is donated to the cause of getting it out, or on January 1, 1998. If enough readers want to hurry up and see the next chapter, they can make a payment. The publisher needs no identification for this, so anonymous payment systems work quite well. The Publisher holds the payments in escrow until the chapter is released, and then sends me my cut. I think I can build a similar protocol without the Publisher taking anything but a backup role--he gets the money transfers and holds them in escrow, and if the chpater isn't released, either he can release it or he can return the money, or donate it to some charity, or whatever. (The whatever has to be spelled out beforehand, and the money mustn't go to the author, directly or indirectly.) This is obviously not a complete solution. The neat thing is, it can be used with other systems. (Thus, if you want to include a shareware/guiltware message on each copy, or try to use some kind of software or hardware protection for the chapters once they're published, then this system doesn't alter that much--the donors simply get prepurchased copies of the book, released on the normal release date.) Similar ideas may work in other areas. In software, I suspect it would be a way of getting a feel from the market for what new features are wanted. In music, perhaps this could be used for individual songs, or maybe it would work better for whole albums. Television and movie serials could work this way (it works for PBS, doesn't it?). Some books, music, and movies would be *awful* to release this way, though. I wish I had a more useful general solution, but maybe this will help a little. Comments? This is clearly not all that new, but I've never seen it in a crypto context from anyone but me. --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey@counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNFt4jEHx57Ag8goBAQHQewQA5ri7HOr/z1vlLhIfvagK2Gmcp/BX9fTk FE3NI/L6sg0S5HvGYre6/Pql+zOvbkN6pq/I5C4kepW/K0Y4tQNYiycbzFaQ3htH EA+3ZZPzuj5Ka7ob/AHSnsKpCVJQaMFgZhLJMZPXG9jWjzSG3k8pVKqJklAlu7Tk x6dpqhE1jZ8= =qjO0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey@counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36