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The people with the moral problem are the parasites, not the creators of filesharing software.
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syrynx

What's wrong with TipJar and PayPal?
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syrynx

Although it's a nice start, the $0.25 + 4% of the donated funds as overhead seems a bit large to me - especially when you could set up the same site using PayPal's web accept feature, which only deducts 1.9% for overhead.

I know there are other costs involved, but it seems if thousands of people donated money through that system there would be a lot of overhead collected.

I'm very sad to see that "the bastards got you down". Kuro5hin.org was an interesting site that was just starting to take off. I had dozens of stories in my hotlist that I hadn't even had a chance to read yet. I do hope this shutdown is temporary; it was a good site. (I don't suppose you can put it up in a readonly mode for registered users to view old material?)

I understand the frustration of dealing with assholes on a volunteer basis; I don't think anyone can fault you for shutting the site down. Still, I think it provided a valuable service to the community, and I think this situation is quite unfair to you. That's why I decided to send you this unsolicited $20 donation for Kuro5hin.org in appreciation for all your hard work. Whether or not you ever revive Kuro5hin.org, keep the money; you've earned it. (Use it to go see a good movie or something!)

Take a break for a few days or weeks; it sounds like you need it. Then, consider if there's a way to bring it back, in a form less vulnerable to abuse. Perhaps anonymous ID's (with waiting periods before posting) and/or "sponsorship" by existing users might help somewhat; I don't know. Maybe just leaving the site down for a week or two will bore the current attackers into going someplace else.

It sure would be nice to return to the spirit of cooperation that Usenet News had 20 years ago. Unfortunately, it's not clear how that's possible given the rampant wave of immature script kiddies ruining everything they can...

I'm very sad to see that "the bastards got you down". Kuro5hin.org was an interesting site that was just starting to take off. I had dozens of stories in my hotlist that I hadn't even had a chance to read yet. I do hope this shutdown is temporary; it was a good site. (I don't suppose you can put it up in a readonly mode for registered users to view old material?)

I understand the frustration of dealing with assholes on a volunteer basis; I don't think anyone can fault you for shutting the site down. Still, I think it provided a valuable service to the community, and I think this situation is quite unfair to you. That's why I decided to send you this unsolicited $20 donation for Kuro5hin.org in appreciation for all your hard work. Whether or not you ever revive Kuro5hin.org, keep the money; you've earned it. (Use it to go see a good movie or something!)

Take a break for a few days or weeks; it sounds like you need it. Then, consider if there's a way to bring it back, in a form less vulnerable to abuse. Perhaps anonymous ID's (with waiting periods before posting) and/or "sponsorship" by existing users might help somewhat; I don't know. Maybe just leaving the site down for a week or two will bore the current attackers into going someplace else.

It sure would be nice to return to the spirit of cooperation that Usenet News had 20 years ago. Unfortunately, it's not clear how that's possible given the rampant wave of immature script kiddies ruining everything they can...

Here's a mirror for PayPai.com. Just go to http://www.paypal.com. :)

1) traditional merchant account (about $30 a month) + lower discount (% of each charge, usually 1.5%-3%) + per-charge flat fee ($.25 to .35).

All the major players have decent methods for integrating their system into your site, everything from hosting the whole shopping cart to various flavors of "your cgi page calls our cgi page, we do the transaction, we redirect back to some cgi of yours with the results". The hackery involved is trivial.

After having problems with one provider who had an annoying habit of randomly double-charging customers, I settled on Anacom and they've been flawless. They've also been around a while.

Option 2 - charge without a Merchant Account. You pay about 1% more on the discount, but unless you're doing $3000 a month in sales or more, you still come out ahead. ProPay seems to be the leader here, but I have no personal experience with them [some of my SelfPromotion.com users have recommended them, though.

3) Indirect, using a web-bank service like PayPal, which just announced a business service. The rates seem a little better if memory serves, but the downside is that people have to be paypal users to use it. My advice is that you should offer PayPal as an OPTION along with (1) or (2) above.

Best,R

PayPal is offering (in collaboration with XBank) a new business PayPal account option. I haven't read too much about it, but it's such a unliateral program that it might be worth c hecking into if nothing else.

And, since I gotta, use me (JArtis1@aol.com) as a referrer if you *DO* go that way...

Good point. MP3 removes the "lock" from music CDs, and consumers have shown that many cannot be "trusted" with this freedom.

However, the djini is out of the bottle already. There simply is no way to go back to the good ol' days when it was hard to copy/share music with digital perfection.

The original poster mentions DIVX, in this regard. The only way for the record companies to prevent Napster-type "theft" would be to stop releasing music in CD format. Sure, they can force manufacturers to make CD players with the latest boneheaded copy-protection scheme, but there are millions of "unsafe" players in the world, which aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

Owners of those players are going to demand new releases in CD format for years to come. The quality of CD music is already so good that the record companies don't really even have the option of enticing us to "upgrade" to a "protected" format because the quality is so much better.

CDs (and legacy players) will be with us for a long time. Ergo, MP3s will be with us for a long time. The record companies will simply have to learn to live with these cold hard facts.

Hell, why not just charge 10 cents per Napster download... and send the money directly to the artists (or to the record company, if the artist's contract requires it).

Go, micro-payments! (Check out PayPal.)

-- TaiwanJohn

I think it's horribly hypocritical of people to complain about how unfair and unusual it is for music to be restricted and controlled, while gleefully taking the results of this control - lots of music in a variety of genres - completely for granted.

Hmm... Funny thing, you don't make any argument to support this premise that the variety of music comes from the oppressive domination of the distributors.

I happen to think that the variety is due to improvements in technology: mostly being able to communicate and travel inexpensively over long distances and increased leisure time due to automated production.

Most musicians can't afford to do this professionally if we don't provide them with a mechanism to make money at it.

Circular logic: they aren't professional if they aren't in it for the money, they won't be in it for the money if there isn't money to be had.

Most music that is produced does not make a net profit. For every song that does become popular and makes a fortune, there are a hundred or a thousand that are ignored.

It isn't because it's "better music" either; do you really think Kenny G, Brittney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys make better music than the typical garage band? How about Milli Vanilli? It's all about promotion and image, about training a captive audience to like something, then telling them to pay for it.

The truth is that most musicians don't have an adequate mechanism to make money. They have a carrot held out of reach by a network of distributors and promoters.

I think a busking model is most appropriate. It removes the necessity of the brainwashing step; people will find what they like and share it with their friends. If it's made easy enough (and between paypal and e-gold it certainly can be easy) and it is explained that this is their primary source of revenue, people will pay, just as they tip when it's expected of them.

What could be simpler? What could be fairer?
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syrynx

checkout for example PayPal, and Just Web It.

PayPal is a way to send money over the internet, it is a nice little operation, and convenient.

Just Web It is a free ecommerce/estore site, just right for the entry band selling some albums and an occasional t-shirt, etc.

These may not be the best options, but they help someone who doesn't have coding expertise to set up a web page.

Now we get to the morons who do not see what their little misstep does on the broader scale. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Atari Computer. Supposedly, they ultimately went under in part because the games for the Atari computer were so popular that everyone hacked them, and the developers ultimately went broke, throwing in the towel. (Anyone remember copy protection?)

of course the hackers were pissed that the company went broke, and didn't connect what they did to the fate of the company.

ultimately, the company got sold and resold many times (history here, and here), and now is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

Officially, there were other market forces at work. But I can not help wondering if these wise fools contributed to the downfall.

checkout for example PayPal, and Just Web It.

PayPal is a way to send money over the internet, it is a nice little operation, and convenient.

Just Web It is a free ecommerce/estore site, just right for the entry band selling some albums and an occasional t-shirt, etc.

These may not be the best options, but they help someone who doesn't have coding expertise to set up a web page.

Now we get to the morons who do not see what their little misstep does on the broader scale. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Atari Computer. Supposedly, they ultimately went under in part because the games for the Atari computer were so popular that everyone hacked them, and the developers ultimately went broke, throwing in the towel. (Anyone remember copy protection?)

of course the hackers were pissed that the company went broke, and didn't connect what they did to the fate of the company.

ultimately, the company got sold and resold many times (history here, and here), and now is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

Officially, there were other market forces at work. But I can not help wondering if these wise fools contributed to the downfall.

Here's a simple way to set up a place like MP3.com that can allow people to easily pay for music.

First, you set up a site to host MP3's, with a collaborative filtering system like others have mentioned. This provides some value to draw people in.

Then make all of the users on the site sign up for PayPal (that's why you'd want some value to draw people in). This is they key factor - without an easy way to pay artists, no one will. Then you could let users download songs, and either throw a bit of money at the artist as a way of saying thank you, paying for higher bitrate encoding, or just buying a CD from the artist online by clicking on a link that would generate a PayPal payment through you to the artist.

On the backend, you offer the artists a choice - you'll be happy to host the MP3's for 10% of any money sent to them, or if they want to host their own music you provide a nice framework and links (and possibly caching) for only 1%. This would encourage bands to build their own websites, which is better for the band and for you.

If the site was really successful, perhaps you could offer artists with a lot of downloads and fan support some use of studio time in different cities across the country.

The basic idea of mass-market busking is that you give stuff away and just ask for donations (and make it convenient for people to do so).

The theory behind it is that groups which pay more will have more buskers trying to please them and get their money, so there is a direct benefit for paying.

It makes the whole process open and honest. You can tell people "I want your money" because the only way you're going to get it is by making something they like well enough to pay for after having tried it. "I want your money" becomes equivalent to "I want to do something which benefits you", because you can't get their money by tricking them into paying for a bad product sight-unseen or slipping in bugs and making them pay for the fixes later.

Paying is effectively saying "I appreciate your work, and I want you to continue with it, but I'm also willing to make similar payments to others who do useful work for me". Instead of hearing about a great company going out of business and thinking "too bad, I wish they could have found some way to force us to pay them the money they needed, I guess they just had a bad revenue model" you can think "hmm, I value their services, how much am I willing to spend to keep them going?".

I think a lot more people will pay if it's okay for them to pay $20 or $5 or $0.50, instead of paying $50 or nothing. I think this article from the mushroom makes my point fairly well. And, of course, it makes sense to pay more than once, depending on how long you use the product.

It is efficient, because there are no middle-men involved. Product goes directly to customers, payment goes directly to producers. Forget advertising costs, the customers seek out worthwhile free stuff and tell their friends about it. No distributors, no salesmen, just programmers, artists, writers, and other creative people. It will probably only cost about a third, and in many cases less, to make and release products of the same quality.

And, of course, it allows you to open-source your product. The users will make it their business to pay only those people who are really responsible for the development, so anyone who puts a stupid little wrapper around your product might get a small amount of payment appropriate to his own effort, but generally won't manage to usurp the rewards for the bulk of the work.

Right now, there are two good services for buskware payments: e-gold and paypal. Paypal is extremely easy to use but only available to Americans; e-gold is less efficient, but internationally available (and, being a gold exchange rather than a dollar exchange, is more suitable for international trade). Both allow all accounts to both give and receive. They are compatible, because you can buy e-gold with paypal, and then send it out of the country, very simply.

Yes, it will probably take some time for everyone to come around, and get used to paying for some future benefit, rather than to access things they would otherwise be cut off from, but somebody's got to start it.

....or just use this link. I get $5 for referring ya, and you get $5 for signing up. What fun!

(ok, so I'm a money whore... come on, I'm a poor college kid in training)

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The word of the day is: float.

1. PayPal eats the initial credit card fees.
2. PayPal encourages people to leave the money within the PayPal system so they can use existing money to pay other people.
3. As long as the money stays within the PayPal system, they can loan the money to other people at prevailing interest rates. (Banks lend each other money "overnight" at, what, 6.5% these days?) The money can be transfered around in the PayPal system almost for free.
4. When/If the money is finially removed from the system it takes 2-3 days to actually leave the PayPal system. That's 2-3 days of interest.

From the money possible with the above, I don't think bankruptcy is a big issue. The cash advance fee is also trivial, especially as money stays in the system longer. (I'd wager that most people who recieve money via PayPal also buy stuff with it. So why take the money out?)

The disputed charge issue is tricky. PayPal shields themselves a little by having "credit limits" on how much you can put in at a time. They do address these issues in their TOS. (Start looking at item 10 and down) Basically, they're saying that if you try to charge back, and you have a balance with PayPal, they're going to get their money. I don't know if this is enforceable or not.

I haven't use PayPal much, but for any person to person or auction transfer of funds it can't be beat.

If anyone is interested in signing up, feel free to send me some money as a trial of the system!

The word of the day is: float.

1. PayPal eats the initial credit card fees.
2. PayPal encourages people to leave the money within the PayPal system so they can use existing money to pay other people.
3. As long as the money stays within the PayPal system, they can loan the money to other people at prevailing interest rates. (Banks lend each other money "overnight" at, what, 6.5% these days?) The money can be transfered around in the PayPal system almost for free.
4. When/If the money is finially removed from the system it takes 2-3 days to actually leave the PayPal system. That's 2-3 days of interest.

From the money possible with the above, I don't think bankruptcy is a big issue. The cash advance fee is also trivial, especially as money stays in the system longer. (I'd wager that most people who recieve money via PayPal also buy stuff with it. So why take the money out?)

The disputed charge issue is tricky. PayPal shields themselves a little by having "credit limits" on how much you can put in at a time. They do address these issues in their TOS. (Start looking at item 10 and down) Basically, they're saying that if you try to charge back, and you have a balance with PayPal, they're going to get their money. I don't know if this is enforceable or not.

I haven't use PayPal much, but for any person to person or auction transfer of funds it can't be beat.

If anyone is interested in signing up, feel free to send me some money as a trial of the system!

There are some new credit card services available, such as PayPal. You open an account, you put money in your account from your credit card, you tell PayPal to transfer money to another PayPal account. The recipient can log in and request a check. It seems to be popular on EBay.

Oh PAYPAL.. Another lamb ready for slaughter. How long before the expenses and fraud catch up with PayPal? Talk about a zero sum gain business. Speaking of "lets just throw some money down the toilet", how about dialpad.com, how long can that last?

But as for PayPal, I can tell you right now they must be making scads of money off the thing. PayPal's one of the most popular auction-payment services ever...which means a whole lot of money is passing through their coffers every day. Do you think they don't float interest off of that money?

Furthermore, they just introduced a "business account" system, where they provide additional services to those who want them, while taking up to 2.5% of those transactions. They were certainly attractive enough to be bought out by the X.com full-service Internet bank within just a few months of their creation.

Trust me on this--banks have little tricks of making money off of things that would cause you or I to scratch our heads. They wouldn't be providing this service if they didn't think it would make them a bundle.
--

First, there is olist.com, a site for people interested in Objectivism. I've been running some variant of this site since something like early 1995, without ever directly making a dime. But I did make money indirectly; I learned HTML in creating the site, which landed this poor philosophy major her first programming job.

In a month or so, I'm going to embark on a major project to create a new type of community-moderated "mailing list" through the olist.com site. I'm going to ask people for "donations" (non-tax-deductible) through PayPal, to compensate me somewhat for my time. I'm hoping that Objectivists, of all people, will be willing to pony up to have a high-quality discussion list again. (I might also be able to sell the software later, which would be great, as I'm sure donations won't even remotely cover the cost of creating the software.)

My other site is GeekPress, a tech news site. After creating the site, I realized that advertising and affiliate programs aren't going to cut it. Why? Banners suck. They suck up space and bandwidth. And their long-term viability as a source of revenue is doubtful. And affiliate programs just don't make enough revenue, unless the site is directly related to what's being sold (like my Nathaniel Branden site). So, I can ask for donations. Yeah, right.

But there is hope. Perhaps GeekPress can, as my Objectivism sites did, propel me into a related career. I have a strong background in analysis, writing, and public speaking from philosophy. I have, through maintaining GeekPress (or more precisely, by reading so much tech news that it makes my head spin), a pretty good grasp of where technology is headed, particularly given our legal and cultural climate. And I have noticed that people seem hungry, given the relentless speed of technology, to make sense of the changes happening as a result of new technology. So, if I can manage to spin out engaging and insightful analyses of tech news to be published elsewhere, I might be able to make some money. And that money will be, somewhat indirectly, the result of my work on GeekPress.

I'm sure that this "related career" model doesn't work for every free site out there. But it has surely made many a site developers a great deal of money, even if they don't quite realize it.

-- Diana Hsieh

For an example of this, look at the site that certain members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Association are putting together, the Storytellers' Bowl. The idea is that pre-completed works will be published serially, each new installment coming out free for all to read, download, copy, pass around on Gnutella, etc. as soon as would-be readers have kicked in enough money. They'll be using the PayPal person-to-person payment system for contributions. It's being discussed now on an SFFnet newsgroup.

I personally think this is a keen idea, and I'm all afire to support it, especially since it's likely to result in more stuff from the Deed of Paksenarrion universe by Elizabeth Moon.
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Since you live in the UK, a lot of options like X.COM or PAYPAL aren't available to you. On the other hand, there are relatively inexpensive escrow services--in particular, iEscrow--that can take the place of your "trust" in dealing with online merchants.

The idea is simple--pay your money to iEscrow--, with a $2.50 fee (normally), the merchant sends you the merchandise, you inspect it, then release the money held in escrow to the merchant if you're satisfied.

The problem with using Escrow services is that most merchants won't want to deal with them, since they require you, the customer, have an "inspection period" to inspect the merchandise and make sure everything's ok before you send them the money. This means that not only do you have to trust the merchant, but the merchant also has to trust you, the consumer. Most are unwilling to do this, and so will instead try to get you to send alternate forms of proof of ID, like you're dealing with now.

As several people mentioned below, the person or people asking you for photo ID for a silly credit transaction are mostly causing themselves problems, not you.

disclaimer - I am not affiliated with paypal. I just think it's a good idea.

PayPal

In any event, with all these changes, one has to wonder: is the banner ad on the way to "dead"?

The problem with banner ads isn't just that they're annoying and consume bandwidth. The real evil is that they put the web on the same "top-down" model as TV and radio, leading us to a situation where a handful of advertisers end up with a lot of control over content.

From the blatant self-promotion department: I'm working on a "bottom-up" system for supporting websites (or other activities) where readers would be able to pay to place sponsored links on a site. I call it the sponsorpool.

It works like this: a sponsor decides how much they're willing to pay , and registers their message and payment on a sponsorpool server. Then on every page load from a sponsored site, a sponsorship message is selected from the pool. The probability of a message being selected is the amount of sponsor's payment for that message, divided by the total amount of sponsorship for the month - the more you sponsor a site for, the more often your message appears, but even a few bucks will get you some impressions.

The hope is that rather than attracting big contributions from a handful of big sponsors, this will attrach many smaller contributions from average readers. (Would you pony up $20 one month for one in a thouand Slashdot page loads to display your message?) I believe this allows a more democratic and more free-market ap proach to site sponsorship that will be much less annoying than banner ads (the links are just text, though there's no technical reason why the system couldn't be expanded to handle images as well). It would benefit small sites and sites with controvertial content that can't attract banner ads.

In addition to supporting websites, I think this could be used to support other activities - a sort of generalized PayLars.com.

I've been hacking on this in my copious spare time for a month or two, and my proof-of-concept pre-alpha 0.0 version should be ready within another week or two. It's just a couple of PHP and shell scripts, and in this first version, payments are handled with PayPal; so anyone with PHP, PostgreSQL, and some time to puzzle over my poorly documented code will be able to set up a server. If anyone would like more info, drop me a line (drop "spambefuddler" from the address above) and I'll send you more information when it's ready. (Which will be Real Soon Now. Unless it's not.)

What about Paypal ? I don't know much about it, but I think people pay Paypal via credit card and Paypal deposits cash into your bank account. It's probably not very "professional" though...

What interest me more are the online friend-to-friend payment services, like PayPal...absolutely free, and you can send money to anyone anywhere--including many eBay auctioneers. And they even pay you for signing up...

Another cool service is paypal.com. It allows two parties who don't accept credit cards to use a credit card for a transaction. It works very well and is perfect for online auction transactions. Any, hey, you get $5 for signing up!
Dave

1. A lightweight operating system. Of course, that means running PalmOS. Sad to say, Linux doesn't have the applications for this kind of situation (yet?).
2. Cryptofinancial Privacy. Use iButton(s) to store things like private keys and other cryptofinancial information. For now, I'll have to be content with GNU Keyring on my Palm IIIx. Confinitiy's PayPal gets a poke in the eye until they get their act together and make a Linux installer for their Palm software.
   
   

   Regarding PayPal: I encourage everyone to open an account (it's free unless you want to use it, then you will have to put some money in it-- personally, I won't be putting any money into it until I can put the PayPal software into my Palm from my Linux box.) and then dropping them a note saying that you would like a Linux installer for the Palm software.

3. Real Style. Not look like something from Logan's Run. Technology is at its best when its subtle and unnoticable. A Palm device in your pocket or purse is pretty unnoticable (until you start using it, then the Unknowing clamor about it 'Ooh, what is that?')
4. Cesium-133 Timepeice Accuracy. It should know how to set its time/date from the Atomic Clock in Fort Collins, CO.
5. Where are ya?. If you're going to put in any kind of radio receiver, you might as well throw a GPS receiver in it so you don't get lost. Or, at the least, be really annoying when you can say "If we keep walking at this rate, we'll get to Fargo in 345 days, 6 minutes, 35 seconds!"
6. Remote control. A really strong IR transceiver for remote control applications. It would be really nice if I didn't have to get up off the couch to grab a remote. Cripes, I've got like 10 of them on the coffee table.

Otherwise, I think the show was mostly an opportunity to show off sexy-sexy models wearing either Goretex or shiny black vinyl. :)
_______
computers://use.urls. People use Networds.

is PayPal.

You can beam the PayPal[tm] software to your friend and then "beam him some money" instantly. The system charges your credit card when you next sync your device, and your friend can register later at PayPal.com.

Mo Money!

- da Lawn

URL: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/ pageview?cmd=investors