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P2P as the artists friend | |||||||||||||||||
This is a shortened version of the idea, as the system wouldn't accpt the full length version. It's based on my experience in financial services compliance, a problem that turned out to be very similar, but not so potentially lucrative. The Problem The content industry cannot hope to control it’s content. Whatever happens, there is no way around the problem that content designed to be experienced by people must always be turned into something that can be experienced, and at this point, it can be captured. Eg – I buy a DRM protected music file. I play it, through a speaker system attached to headphones on a binaural recording head. Result – an almost perfect copy, DRM broken. I upload to my share system. Soon everyone has a perfect copy of a “good enough” original. You only need a few people who will break the DRM, to make DRM useless. Solution Use the following:- 1) P2P is FREE DISTRIBUTION 2) People will pay, they want to pay, but they want to decide how much and on what terms. Ie capture the money from voluntary support and forget about freeloaders. 3) They want to pay the artists, not the record company. Work with this. People WILL opt in to something that works in the background, under their control. 4) Collection is an aggregtated payment problem, not a micropayment one. 5) Financially, it's a simple clearing house where tracks are registered and tagged, and data/money then sent to the right people. 6) Massive CRM implications - gigs lists etc to generate more revenue for artists. Cost - several hundred K to demo, several million to implement (mainly re the clearing house). Reward - how about 10% of the entire content industry gross, possibly billions a year. Who could do it? Any industry player, but my money is on a new one:-)
iandickson, Oct 06 2003
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Ian,
Seven days ago I decided that working on this very same idea is the most important thing I can do with my life. I see much broader applications for voluntary payments in the future.
I want to demo this on my own server for free in the coming weeks. I see an easy way to do it. Maybe I can use a Paypal-like system to do bank account transfers. Maybe I'll try to get Paypal/Ebay interested. I am about to quit my job, so I can focus on this full time. If anyone out there wants to work together on this, I feel like everything I have done in my life, school, work and life experiences have led me toward "voluntary, open, accounted micro donations." Why don't we just call it a "tip."
I have had this same idea lately, but with a couple twists. I really like your explanation of the "air gap" problem with DRM. Personally, I know that all copyrights and patents are counterproductive and am working to develop ways for authors and artists to get paid for creating, rather than using the government to bestow ownership rights on them so that they can freely share their work with the widest possible audience. All my work is for tips only (public domain)!
The way to make this work is to offer the service free to everyone and in turn collect voluntary payments for it. Maybe an artist will elect to donate 1% or 0.01% or whatever of his new revenue stream back to the company providing the service.
I see this as enabling the kind of commerce that happens when a street musician leaves their guitar case open and passerby show their appreciatation by voluntarily tossing in their pocket change.
see: betterdifferent.com/banking
This way it doesn't cost authors or artists anything unless they get some value from it and choose to kick some back to the service provider who made it possible. This would be of such a great value to everyone that you can't help but get rich one way or another. If you use voluntary payments for the service, use of the system will spread the fastest and everyone will have vested interest in maintaining and improving it.
The last twist is that this kind of voluntary payment scheme should be done completely openly, so that everyone can see how many donations or tips that everyone has made and to whom so that the total value is not blown out of proportion and so that fraud is reduced. People can also "price discriminate" themselves: a rich person would no doubt tend to donate more than a poor person, in line with the relative value the good or service or piece of information has for them.
As someone enjoys a song or reads an essay (or idea!) that has particular value to them, they need to be empowered to EASILY click a small icon (or set it up in their file sharing application) to generate an entry in their open (not password protected) "tip log."
At the end of the month, or time period of their choosing, they log-in with a password to positively identify themselves (additional security measures can be added by third parties if desired by the user), verify their intended tips, scale them to match the amount of funds they want to pay (or have available that month!), cancel any they have second thoughts about, flag any that are suspicious so that others can look closely at them, and finally approve the transfers from their account to those they are tipping/paying/donating.
The user takes full responsibility for verifying all their outgoing tips, the service is free, after all. After time, relationships will be formed and users can allow tips to go to trusted accounts without review.
Being open to anyone (username/account number only, no password), Tip log entries should not be able to be deleted, only appended, as is the case with wiki's, and other modern software that permits unlimited versioning (wiki.org zope.com). Third parties will add value by analysing history, trends and popularity.
Because anonymity is discouraged in this scheme, there is also very little opportunity for fraud. "If the door is open, you can't have a break-in" Anyone who is exposed as a fraud will be instantly public identified and all those who they stole from would instantly know who they were. This is a huge deterrent. Openness=Honesty.
I don't know why I didn't connect the dots right away, but:
We need to implement this voluntary small payment scheme on WhyNot.Net to encourage people to share their ideas in the public domain.
It makes perfect sense and would work so much better than paypal donations. Get paid for sharing your great ideas!
Nate
I have just written a related news story on my website: Channel Surfer's Fans Free The Music, http://betterdifferent.com/channelsurfer.
Also, I have continued to develop Voluntary Payments as my life purpose. It is now a complete voluntary economic system that builds on all the benefits of Capitalism, but uses all Voluntary Payments and is without central control or regulation of the currency(ies). Inspired by the kindergartern star-system, it is called Hugs and Stars, and has its own idea here, http://whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=1222, and of course it is on betterdifferent.com.