DRM technology and policy

[Thomas Shaddack]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, David Howe wrote:
> I am not sure the commercial-album-by-major-label business model is really needed any more -

Let's face it: isn't.

> perhaps a gig-based income model, plus an extension to the mp3/ogg formats to support a "tip
> for this song now" button on players, would suffice...

Free distribution is a free advertisement for live performers.

The "tip" infrastructure would require establishing some kind of
standards: possibly a digital token, a standardized data block (difitally
signed XML?) with the author contact data. No need for support directly in
the players - it can be easily handled by a standalone application. (Then
you don't have to directly modify all the players, you can have a
commandline "tip <file.ext>" command that handles all kinds of files
supporting the tokens (that can include e-books - inserting an XML chunk
to HTML is something between simple and trivial, and can include even
"contentless" tokens for contact of authors of "dataless" performances and
the cases when the legacy file format doesn't allow inclusion of other
data. If the standard will be designed as wildly extensible and
backward-compatible (HTML, with its mechanism for ignoring unknown tags,
is my favorite example), shouldn't even take too long to implement.
Another required thing would be a simple infrastructure for digital
micropayments - possibly using the anonymous money discussed here lately.

There are a few things I seen/heard/read recently, that I consider
excellent. I am very willing to pay the authors (if possible without
having to feed the parasitical infrastructure of labels and publishers in
the process). And there is no easy-to-use mechanism for that :(