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Implemented ages ago, in the public domain.

Monte Carlo pledge fulfillment for the Buskpay microdonation system.

Implemented ages ago, in the public domain.

Monte Carlo pledge fulfillment for the Buskpay microdonation system.

...and what better way to start than to help launch the tools for helping launch the research?

Stuff that's free for everybody's use should be paid for by the people who expect to benefit from it and want to be a part of it. Free software, basic research, space exploration... all stuff that could be completely funded by small donations from large numbers of interested individuals.

Sure it's awesome to get in there and get your hands dirty, but you can't actually work on every cool project. You could be an important part of each and every one through microdonations.

Basic research is mostly stuff that's either unpatentable or will not turn a profit before the patent runs out. For the few exceptions, there's circle-and-destroy patenting, and other foul play, to level the playing field between scientist-based companies and lawyer-based companies. Nobody's doing basic reseach because, rich as the rewards may be for humanity, little is to be gained by the researchers.

So who should be funding research? It's the general public that is going to benefit most from basic research, so I believe it should be funded by individual private donations. Furthermore, I believe the best donation strategy is a reward strategy, based on results rather than bureaucratic judgements of potential. That would encourage doing real research rather than the perpetual funding chase that's so common. Researchers could either bootstrap themselves with inexpensive theoretical research, or try to convince investors that their expensive experimental research would pay off big. It should be possible to get rich doing basic research. After all, in a situation like that, wouldn't a billionaire Einstein be likely to invest his rewards in the next wave's Einstein?

With computers and the internet, we have the ability to organize ourselves and individually allocate our research money to what we would judge worthwhile without spending much of our time at it. What we lack is the ability to actually distribute our donations with that same ease and efficiency. However, that can be fixed.

The government could cut all research and lower taxes (letting people decide what they want to support with their own money), and universities could focus on teaching. I think it would be a better situation all around.

I said, "The reduced demand will drive prices up higher," but I meant the reduced use would drive up both price tolerance and the need to make more money for value delivered. Basically, the same way arcade game prices crept up from quarters to dollars as fewer people used them less often.

Also, for those of you with sigs turned off (I forget you can do that), my sig links to buskpay.com.

People who support micropayments usually claim that they'll be so small that you won't notice them, much less care about them. Nice dream, but it doesn't take into account the motivations of the people involved.

When people set their mandatory micropayment prices, they'll do it to maximize profit. The prices will find and sit at the awareness threshold of users, so you'll look up and see you've spent $5 over the course of a few minutes without really noticing it. People will respond to this by thinking of internet use as an expensive activity, and keeping it to a minimum. The reduced demand will drive prices up higher.

That's a natural consequence of each entity setting the prices of what their selling. Information doesn't compete on price very well. I forget who said it... "Information wants to be free, because it's so easy to distribute, yet information wants to be expensive, because it's so useful." When the people owning the information set the price, they can make it expensive, because it takes a fairly high price before it's better than not having the information.

However, voluntary micropayments don't have this tendency, being set by the users. Ultimately, I think voluntary payments will win out in any area with a sufficiently clued-in audience to make it work. The competitive advantages of free information are obviously huge, so wherever they can make enough profit to develop a comparable product to the restricted information, they'll win. Also, voluntary micropayments are much simpler and cheaper to implement.

I've written a bit on the kind of systems that would be needed (and can fairly easily be developed) to replace intellectual property restrictions, and I've done some work developing parts of them (see my sig).

I don't think so. I believe that purely voluntary, uncoerced payment could not only be adequate, but better for both the users and producers of information products. Traditionally, publishers and retailers took the lion's share of income, so considerably smaller revenue will mean equal or greater profit for the creator. In other words, if you don't make the creators force you to pay them, you can pay them a lot less and they'll be just as well-rewarded and encouraged to make more good stuff.

I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.

However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.

Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.

Essentially, you're relying on voluntary payment. So far, so good. People are honest. Most leave their quarter in the basket by the coffee machine, even when they're in someone else's department and nobody would notice them stealing coffee.

The major flaw with this is convenience: the time it takes to pay is part of the price. Often, it's damn expensive, as it means tracking down how to pay, filling out registration forms, sometimes even actually writing out a check and mailing it. Think of an extra cost of fifteen minutes to half-hour, when the customer knows that none of the value of that time is being transferred to the donor, it's all being wasted.

The other flaw of shareware is setting a price. You're already relying utterly on the user's honesty, yet you have the gall to insult him by telling him exactly what to pay you. That's like a waitress saying, "Remember to tip 15%; I won't check until after you've left but you have to tip me exactly 15% of the price of your meal." How many tips do you think she would get?

How do you set a price? For each user, if it's less than he's willing to pay, you're turning away part of the payment, if it's more, you're turning away all of the payment. Shareware doesn't compete on price, nobody downloads the $5 shareware because they can't afford the $30 shareware. So people pull up random numbers that only serve to annoy the user.

Most of the time, shareware is waaay over priced. You have these situations where if everyone who ever used the software paid for it as they are supposedly legallly required to, a lone programmer of moderate skill would make a hundred million dollars for a two months' work. People know that kind of price isn't based on an expectation of them being honest, so they don't feel an obligation to be honest. If most people were paying, a small fraction of current posted prices would often be profitable. When it's not overpriced, it's too small to be worth taking 15 minutes to pay.

That's not even getting into the question of why a user wouldn't be entirely willing to pay for a piece of software in multiple installments, just whenever they think, "Damn, this thing is handy! Why shouldn't I give this guy another dime?"

The key is to make this voluntary payment more convenient than grabbing change out of your pocket, and it has to work for such small amounts that people can use it every day to be in the habit without spending an arm and a leg. Click on "Pay for it," click on "$0.25" that's it. Maybe the donor has to do some setup (choosing a service provider) and monthly maintenance (paying the bill) to make the payment system work, but if you can get him using it for a few cents here and there every day, that won't be significant.

That's why I came up with just such a system (Buskpay): to make this truly Free, yet truly commercial style of software, which I call Buskware, practical. It's working now, it's completely free and open (public domain, in fact), and every part of it except the service providers already exists, and it's a free market so anyone can provide that simple service (business or hobby, it's far, far simpler and safer from fraud than a real-time, authenticated, mandatory payment system) and there are substitutes already fully functioning (such as probabilistic payments and mass payment with E-Gold). Since it's based on caching intended payments on the donor's own machine, and recipients using general payment information rather than accounts with the delivery services, you can start using it without worrying about how you will actually send the money -- you can cross that bridge when you come to it, and rest assured that your cached pledges are part of a growing incentive for someone to provide that service.

If only the people who wanted to make money from it themselves started using it, and put up with the inconveniences of booting it up, that would be enough to attract and refine the necessary infrastructure to make it attractive to their target market: the general public.

Buskpay - A Decentralized Meta-Payment System

The idea is to have little text files that list a variety of payment methods and stuff like contact information. You use these to make a big list of all the penny-donations you want to make, and worry about how to pay them in a batch later. $20 batches of tiny donations are much easier to handle than donations individually, so practically anyone could set up a business to do this, once a couple thousand people wanted to use it regularly.

I'm sure lots of people have their own tiny project to show off.

I'll start the ball rolling with my Buskpledge Windows program, for collecting and managing donation pledges. It lets you make 2-click pledges from web-pages, view and edit the pledges individually or en masse, and can redirect you to direct donation pages such as Amazon Honor System or PayPal. Full install and uninstall in under 35k.

Source is available at the project page. It's a little wierd, using a custom semi-literate programming tool, and a half-assed gzip clone for internal compression.

To me, fair use rights aren't a big concern. If you can see it or hear it, you can get an adequate sample for fair use with a cheap camera or audio recorder. You don't need perfect digital video samples to make your point for a review.

The larger issue here is this desperate attempt to cling to a ridiculously outdated and inefficient method of securing profit in return for desirable intellectual production.

Put in simple terms, DRM hurts our economy. Very, very badly.

Economic growth comes from improvements of efficiency, clearing out the dead wood and finding a use for it elsewhere. Following the analogy, DRM is better systems of stakes and cables holding the dead wood from being carted off.

There is a whole ridiculous, unproductive structure built around milking every penny out of copyrighted works. This is justified essentially by accusing every citizen of the stupidest kind of miserliness, unwilling to give a dime to make they're favorite movie studio make another next year, but willing to pay a dollar as long as you don't let them into the theater otherwise.

Yes, there are people out there like that, but I don't believe they're the majority for a second!

The tools are out there, and could be supported and working everywhere in weeks if people want them to be. Don't like the details of that system? Propose another. It's not rocket science: donation doesn't need real-time verification, so it's an easy problem, as long as we agree on some system.

Once people get in the habit of freely parting with their pocket change for things that they'd gladly pay much more for, copyright will be a ridiculous anachronism, and we can finally get on with reaping the benefits of the information age.