legetimised (or uncontrollable) piracy or info-market of the future (Re: Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads?)

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Mon Feb 26 23:03:47 PST 2001


If we get to the situation where ISPs want people to
use their bandwidth because they're getting paid for it,
it makes sense for the ISP to give a kick back to the
person who hosted the data or was involved in the chain
which caused the user to reach that content.

We already have many cable subscribers using
capped flat-rate services, where there are
charges over the capped limit.

However I think these caps are typically intended
to strongly discourage going over the cap (at least
the it would seem so from the charges they levy
over the 4GB download cap in my case).

I'm not sure of the trends, or the long term outcome
but if we do get to the case were people are more 
metered for service, something useful could be done
with strongly anonymous ecash micropayments:

the ISPs could pay their network connections to
other ISPs per Megabyte.  Then as an aspiring
content pimp the current day warez, video and 
music traders could migrate to making big bucks
by giving people what they want.  The smart content
authors / providers would compete.  The dumb ones
would try to outlaw such things and hopefully lose
rather than turning the world into the draconian 
place it would have to be for their full intent
in drafting the DMCA and WIPO offenses.

Whether or not artists get money for the works they
release depends on how badly people want to pay
the lowest price for their content.  It's a market
fought on price vs availability, scalability (to
handle flash crowds), and convenience.  Some vendors
may offer the claim or proof that they pay some
percentage to the author, some may not.  The market
will decide.  The author or original distributer
of content chooses his parameters (requested proportion
of content redistribution bandwidth costs) to optimise
his profits.  If he sets it too high, people will have
the incentive to save a few cents getting it from 
warez.com; if he sets it low enough it will be below
the threshold for which people are willing to search
harder.

Adam

On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:32:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> 
> At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> >
> >If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web
> >agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it,
> >they might have something I'd use.
> 
> Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's 
> a porn site that they specifically want.
> 
> There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
> 
> The "10 cents to read this dumb page" model is likely to fail.
> 
> What I think, or what we think, doesn't make it so. But Cypherpunks 
> should certainly not think of these kinds of micropayments as the 
> holy grail for digital money.
> 
> This said, there may someday be _novel_ micropayment applications. 
> Some think newspaper subscriptions (with more or less true 
> representations of page layouts, as a couple of newspapers are 
> proposing) will be this application. I suspect not.
> >
> >
> >My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online
> >habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a
> >trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is
> >being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every
> >ten seconds on the site.
> 
> And there will likely be scams whereby tens of millions of Web 
> surfers find out "two trailing weeks later" that they paid some money 
> for something they didn't want, as when they were redirected to some 
> page and charged automatically before they even knew they were there.
> 
> Even with limits on payments--to stop the $135.87 "fee" for landing 
> on www.sexyfun.com by accident or by redirection--there will be 
> angles for grifters and cons to exploit anytime an automated "don't 
> bother me with petty charges" system is used.
> 
> Maybe something like a token dispenser radio button. When a page 
> comes up, one "feeds tokens in."
> 
> There are a few obvious candidates for "minipayments": software 
> downloads (shareware or commercial), songs and music in some 
> post-Napster world, etc.





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