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I donated to Red Cross through PayPal...

Here's a great photo that a friend sent me Wednesday: Heroes

Donate to Red Cross via PayPal

Probably inspired by the Red Cross donation fund, someone put up a Geocities Web site to solicit reward money to catch the WTC terrorists, with contributions via PayPal and Amazon.

In the old days, only the wealthy could put a price on someone's head. Thanks to Paypal etc. now we all can.

"On conviction, the monies will be distributed in equal shares to the person or person(s) who provided information which led to the arrest and prosecution. This determination shall be made either by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or by the Federal courts."

Give via PayPal: PayPal towerrevenge@yahoo.com

Give via Amazon: Amazon PayPage

Information: http://www.geocities.com/towerrevenge/

What do you think?

Probably inspired by the Red Cross donation fund, someone put up a Geocities Web site to solicit reward money to catch the WTC terrorists, with contributions via PayPal and Amazon.

In the old days, only the wealthy could put a price on someone's head. Thanks to Paypal etc. now we all can.

"On conviction, the monies will be distributed in equal shares to the person or person(s) who provided information which led to the arrest and prosecution. This determination shall be made either by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or by the Federal courts."

Give via PayPal: PayPal towerrevenge@yahoo.com

Give via Amazon: Amazon PayPage

Information: http://www.geocities.com/towerrevenge/

What do you think?

All the money from PayPal's donation page goes there also, just like the Amazon page. The site is here...

Or copy and paste: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/rel ief-outside

PayPal also has a donation site set up here

To give money via Paypal: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/rel ief-outside

relief@paypal.com

This money will go directly to the American Red Cross National Disaster Relief Fund and is tax-deductible.

To give money: write a check and mail it either to your local chapter (made out to "National Disaster Relief Fund") or to the national address at:

American Red Cross
PO Box 37243
Washington, DC 20013

To give blood immediately: GO TO your local American Red Cross blood donor center, expect waits. Check news media and/or the Red Cross Web site (http://www.redcross.org) for details. Note that many local chapters have Web sites which have local information and are not overloaded. If Red Cross donation centers are full, check local hospitals and news media for blood drives.

To give blood in a few days: call your local American Red Cross chapter for information or make an appointment through the national number 1-800-GIVE-LIFE.

The desperate need for blood will continue for weeks.

To donate your time or services: go to your local American Red Cross chapter HQ and volunteer your services, they are swamped.

If you have _real_ intel regarding NYC or Washington DC, something you saw personally (please don't waste their time):

https://www.ifccfbi.gov/complaint/terrorist.asp

As I pointed out on Slashnet yesterday, PayPal has a similar service if you have a paypal account:

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/rel ief-outside

If any of you don't have a PayPal account yet, you can sign up and get $5 free. My first act: give give it to the red cross fund. Go to PayPal now and sign up!

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/rel ief-outside

Well, technically speaking he -did- go to the media ... :)They went to the FBI. Maybe he should have anonymously reported it to some other media faction and let them do with it what they will.

And before anyone gets upset at a slight amount of levity in this post, I've contributed to the case and I fully support him.

Even if he did break a law technically (not saying either way, we may never know for sure without examining the logs ourselves ... hey ... that would be cool), he did the Right Thing and I'm throwing my support behind him.

Do Something About This!

The difference between paypal and microsoft merely is the fact that passport is not intended for micropayments, as I believe that ms will mostly focus on the b2b market.

For micropayments, Paypal has low risk because they have taken a mix of all sorts of measures. An ex-FBI agent is in charge of two or three fraud detection teams, their "IGOR" system is an automated fraud detection system. Because the wallet contains such small amounts of money, the loss risk is therefore much smaller than if you'd use big amounts - necesary for b2b transactions.

I do notice the resemblance between PP and MS that they are dealing with the same security problems, perhaps this is why PP and MS are collaborating. When MS chooses not to work with micropayments, my guess is that they could get a lot of security problems, not only the ones written in the article, also the securite problems Paypal hasn't solved technically, but manually.

[Note: This is entirely fictional. Lion Kimbro is an OpenSource user, advocate, teacher, and programmer.]

For just pennies a day, the cost of a cup of coffee, you can save one of thousands of OpenSource developers like these:

Camera pans down and to the left to the image of a shrunken, pale, programmer, intraveneously importing deep brown coffee into his system, working with gdb on debugging a file system.

For just Pennies a day, you can make all the difference for a programmer who has no life, no future. When you pledge your pennies, you will receive, with every quarterly report, a low quality JPEG of your programmer, and also a plaintext email from your programmer, telling you about his dreams for his software.

(Camera pans up and to the right, focusing on an image of Linus Torvalds, with a silly grin, reaching out to punch a final semicolon on his keyboard.)

Just look at what previous contributions have done for these people; As your developer grows and grows, day by day, you will feel such pride at his accomplishments.

Please, go to your PayPal account, send a $15 contribution for this month to "lion@speakeasy.org" and have the satisfaction that for the pittance of a cup of coffee a day, you've made the world a better place.

What will help, quite simply, is donating money. I support the EFF through my donations and most recently, I've donated money directly to Dmitry's fund (dmitry@shmoo.com). I encourage you to do the same, as this is quite simply the only thing that will have an effect. Money talks - if its important to you (I don't rightly see how it couldn't be) - put your money where your mouth is.

Reading through the links from this post I was suddenly struck by an assumption that I have been making (and that I think a lot of people here have been making, as well.) Micropayments are wonderful and awful. They would allow us to pay for content on the web in a way that we could handle, but they would also provide us with a new added stressor: The question "To click, or not to click?" But the links in the above article raise the question: Why not micropay subscriptions? Let me theorize. 1. Escrow services with digital money like PayPal provide some easy interchange with some sort of RPC or other. Note that this theorizes competition, which would be a good thing. Allowing MS to dominate this field would be a bad thing. 2. Artists, Musicians, Cartoonists, short-film-makers, journalists, etc.. have sites. They don't have to be affiliated with anybody, they don't have to be sponsored. They charge tags on html pages that contain content that can be downloaded with information about what they are. Easy digital signature creation so that artists can sign their work. 4. Search engines, Napster, Gnutella etc.. Except that the file-sharing apps themselves provide access to sample/freely available material from these people's websites. Those sites to which you have subscribed also allow you to download their free stuff. (The reason for this is that it is currently MORE CONVENIENT for me to get music for free from Gnutella or something like that than it is for me to go to the store. Also, the effect of being exposed to a wide variety of everything is another useful aspect of the napster-esque system.) I think that these principles would create a system with an incentive to not bother to share info, and also provide a way for us to stick it to "The Man" (tm). Artists could not play that game anymore. It relies on three things: #1 - Easy-to-use escrow services with standards #2 - Easy-to-use search applications, with standards #3 - Effective ways for people to trust the artist. Please, rip this apart. I'd like to know what people think.

This is the obvious reason where a digital currency (read: cash-like, send a "token" automatically or via a single click and away you go without doing any of the above steps or directly revealing your personal info) would be great.

Unfortunately all current governments like to keep their monopoly on minting and controlling currencies so the concept has never been properly implemented in such a way that it could catch on.

The cost of running online services combined with basic greed makes current sites want to collect personal info and subscriber habits because that information is considered valuable and is needed for poor credit card "authentication".

One idea: Paypal or someone similar should make open source browser plugins for all platforms so that a simple tag could be used to indicate when a zero or one click micropayment is needed to the server. (the current several clicks, into another site, system that both they and amazon offer is too cumbersome)

The server should then refuse any more requests from that user (a session id in the URL or a session only cookie is required) until they have paid.

Trusted sites should be configurable (one-click automagically) in the software to say "pay this content provider without asking up to this much over this period of time"
...

get the picture?

that's doable ontop of existing stuff today.

A similar UI structure to the above would be needed for a digital token based content payment system.

Reasons this will never happen anytime soon:
* providers would need to start charging reasonable and consistent tiny fees per chunk of content. haha.
* contracts for royalties as written today would likely require keeping detailed accounting of each micropayment and fraction of where it should go. This makes micropayments useless as the cost of such accounting is too high.

PayPal does something like that, as I recall.

You mean something like PayPal?

I just signed up for it the other day... it lets use your checking account to send money, and the payee (who gets an e-mail notice) can have it dumped into their checking account.

Perhaps I'm missing something but this sounds a lot like what you are referring to.

It works in combination with our Micropay server (connected with Paypal and eventually a number of other money transfer systems) so that the spammers can essentially pay you postage for sending you mail. We're about to release a Windows client (only days away), but a Linux one is in the works...

Take a look at the product sheet here for more info

Have you looked at PayPal? Another poster mentioned it, but if you look at the business account, you'll see that anything up to $15 has only a .30 cent fee!! Not to mention that they have a very good instaled user base of people who will have money sitting in a PayPal account and thus a bit more likley to buy something cheap.

I've used them both to accept payments and to pay others for quite a while now, and I've never seen anything come close to being the bargain PayPal is.

Of course, it's much better to donate by credit card, than to not donate at all. :>

Also, please note that your contributions are tax-deductible (at least in the USA).

-- Agthorr

Excellent. Reminds me of the Windows/Office XP registration bogosity, where you have to get permission from MSFT to continue running the software you (most likely) paid for if you ever upgrade your motherboard or hard drive, or if BillG just feels like making you say "Uncle."

This momentous event has inspired me to coin a neologism (note 1) describing software or hardware products whose vendors exercise an inappropriate, unwarranted, and unsolicited degree of remote control over its post-purchase operation:

Tetherware.

Google doesn't find any occurrences of the term on either WWW or Usenet, so I hereby claim all proprietary IP rights to the word "tetherware" and all variants thereof on an exclusive worldwide basis.

Happily, a license to propagate this meme is available for only $1 per use, payable via PayPal to jmiles@pop.net. Use of the term "tetherware," in public or private, without remittance of the license fee will result in the remote disabling of your personal communications apparatus via techniques previously employed by Vader et al., Imperial Business Software Alliance, c. 1977.

I've even come up with a tres trendy slogan for my new invention:

"Tetherware: Where do you want to be dragged kicking and screaming today?"

(Note 1: If you don't know what a "neologism" is, see http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?neologism and choose the meaning that most clearly applies.)

A penny to anyone that finds out the proposed street price for the media on this thing. And I'm not kidding.
~

On a tangentially related note, x.com was formerly used by a really sucky online bank, known for screwing its customers by freezing their accounts for no good reason and putting them in a Kafka-esque nightmare trying to deal with their bureaucracy to get them unfrozen, as well as changing their terms of service constantly without notice to impose minimum balances, fees, etc. where none existed before. Then they suddenly left the banking business, causing customers' checks to bounce as the accounts became unavailable and "the check was in the mail" to the customers to eventually get their balance back. Now they own PayPal and are running that service in much the same screwball manner. Read some horror stories in sites like Epinions.

I don't know how they managed to get that single letter domain, but they don't seem to really be using it any more; it just redirects to the PayPal site now.

I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.

Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.

Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.

It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?

So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them. :)

Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway :( If it's something people want, we could certainly conside it.

I would certainly consider paying for some of the sites I visit regularly. The problem is just that I wouldn't know how.

Like many people in Europe, I don't have a credit card (I just don't need one, why pay for it?). And international money orders or such are just way too expensive. Getting money from Europe to the US is difficult enough even if you don't factor in the additional complications and privacy concerns with paying over the internet.

Things like PayPal don't work either because they address the difficulty of managing micropayments, not the difficulty of transfering money over the Atlantic.

It is really ridiculous that money transfers would be so enormously expensive in the age of the internet. But as long as my bank charges me 10% of the sum transfered or $5 (whichever is more) for any money transfers, I'm not going to make lots of them any time soon.

1. Add artists to your shopping cart as usual
2. Proceed to the checkout page
3. Note the total amount of your shopping cart
4. Click the PayPal button (to mail us the contents of your shopping cart)
5. Go to: www.paypal.com
6. Send paypal@fairtunes.com the same amount of money as your shopping cart.

Why go to the expense of redeveloping the banner ad system, before you even bother giving PayPal a chance? Give the readers a chance to trial different sponsorship/subscription plans, before you write off those methods as "unworthy".

Most people I know are aware of how much it costs (esp. in terms of maintenance work) to keep a web site online. We'd be willing to contribute some amount on an irregular basis. Heck - maybe we'd even be willing to "tip" for good stories. Where's a Jon Katz story when I've got a few spare dollars? ;)

Maybe then the editors would realise that I like certain types of article, and hate others (because when they write the ones I like, they get more money).

Flexible online payment methods make it easier for small players to operate on the marketplace - whether your talking about content providers asking for tips, or super specialized vendors providing better service than their mammoth competitors.

Involuntary micropayments are NOT the way to go, we need something like PayPal, but with universal access and ease-of-use that is comparable/superior to live cash money.

Transaction costs keep mankind down!

So they come up with a slightly slicker version of Paypal's Web Accept program. (One of Amazon's innovations is a personalized greeting on the payment button -- a feature that may backfire given the privacy issues.) But everyone's going to ask, Doesn't Paypal already do this? And why should an emerchant use Amazon -- a competing emerchant?

So they don't market the thing as a micropayment system. They call it a "tip jar" system, which makes it sound like something new, and gives them a foothold in small sites that are noncommercial or don't compete with Amazon. That creates "brand awareness" (a holy concept with this company) and a chance to get a foothold in a market dominated by Paypal.

I think the whole thing's gonna be a big bust. Paypal has done a good job of designing a simple, usable payment system and building a loyal customer base. The Amazon payment systemis one of those half-assed initiatives that works better as a Powerpoint presentation than in the real world.

__________________

... was dealt with some time ago at that site.

The decision at that time appeared to be that advertising, though annoying, was important if the site maintainers (rusty and Inoshiro primarily) were to have the ability to maintain and upgrade the site. And anyways, surely something like PayPal would be more useful? They only take a small cut of the money (though the cut on $1 would be pretty big, I admit).

Paypal!

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

While I think that the idea of compensation for the "right to use Napster" is a good thing, I have to wonder if this type of setup really makes sense. You have to look at where the money will flow versus where it should flow. In this case, I think that the obvious recipient of any cash should be the person who is hosting the MP3s. After all, you're not downloading MP3s from Napster per se; you're downloading them from another anonymous Internet user who is providing the files as a service to the community as a whole. Up until now, that service has been provided for free.

Case in point: if some skinny earringed punk spends all night downloading Limp Bizkit MP3s from my machine over his 56K modem, and in so doing reduces my total available bandwidth for things such as 2.4 a kernel download, if anybody should be getting paid for it, it's me. Napster is the only widely-used Internet application that involves people just giving away large chunks of bandwidth for free without any form of compensation (either directly or indirectly through methods such as forced advertisement viewing.) There is no reason that this state of affairs needs to be maintained.

This could be worked out fairly easily, I think; all you would really need is to have everybody establish PayPal accounts and then modify the central Napster server so that it credits and debits appropriate amounts of money upon completion of a download. A dime a song? A quarter? These are numbers that we can work out. The important thing is getting the infrastructure in place. Once that is done, the rest of the pesky details can be worked out.

At any rate, money-to-the-hoster is the only fair and equitable scenario. It doesn't need to go to Napster itself; all they do is provide a simple online database that points you to the folks who are doing the real work. And it sure as hell doesn't need to go to the RIAA; the CDs that the songs were ripped from were already paid for once. You don't see the government tax you twice on the same income (except for inheritance taxes, perhaps, but that's a different debate.) You don't see the justice system attempt to try people twice for the same crime after they've been acquitted.

So if Napster is going to move to a pay-for-play model, good .. let's just make sure we get it right.

Actually, that's not true anymore.

PayPal is now available in the following countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Canada
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Portugal
• Singapore
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom

I mean, sure, you have to sign up for it, but what with all the paperwork surrounding banks and credit cards these days, it's almost a certainty that you'd have to sign up for whatever micropayment system came along anyway. And sure, it charges businesses a transaction fee, but not as big of one as credit card companies (and micropay systems have to make their money somehow anyway).

You can send a little as a penny with PayPal (though you have to put a dollar in your account to do it), and I've seen quite a few people (like the Alice Comics guy) putting "click here to drop some coins in my hat"-type links with it on their webpages (and then reporting being surprised at the number of people who donated with them). What does PayPal lack to make it a viable micropayment system for the 'net?
--

What it appears he is looking for is a system like PayPal to take hold so I could check his comic every day and he could charge me 1c a viewing. But it would have to be really simple and common before it would start to work. Personaly I wouldn't mind a system like this, perhaps paying .5c each day I visit slashdot wouldn't be a bad idea.

As a Canadian, I have to pay a fee on every transaction to cover the cost of converting the payment into US dollars. The fee is 2.6% plus 30 cents, which kills any micropayment possibility.

As it happens, the fee is charged twice if you're sending money to other Canadians -- once to convert it to US dollars and once to convert it back. The magic of the digital economy!

I eagerly became a PayPal member, but after learning all the terms, I don't think I'll ever be a PayPal user.

Yogurt

One drawback might be currency conversion costs. PayPal now seems to have gone more international, but the web really needs a single currency.

The writer of that piece (Scott McCloud) is also the author of two great books on comic art (or Sequental Art, as he puts it):

Understanding Comics
which talks about the atructure of comics, and the mechanism that lets you understand the temporal/spatial/emotial concepts comics attemtpt to portray, and

Reinventing Comics (which the author mentions is the piece you posted), a book I have just received and not read yet - but is about how comics are transitioning into the digital world, and I image if you liked the short piece linked to in the original comment you'd love this book!

My second thought is this - why do more people not use PayPal for online micropayments? I ask this becase witrh PayPal it's easy enough to set up a simple link that you can have a reader use to pay you as little as .01, plenty small enough for most micropayments. The reader gets to use a credit card to pay if they wish. As Scott said, whenever he wrote a really good comic and made it availiable online I'd be happy to cough up .25 or .50 it it was quick and easy to do.

It is true that to offer this service PayPal takes some percentage, perhaps that is enough to stop it from being used. I'd be interested in hearing from other people about possible problems with using PayPal as a micropayment system.

A final note - the comment used in my sig was found in Reiventing Comics.

Enter a high-paying career in anti-spam technology with high-paying technology companies!

Earn money hawking anti-spam products!

Qualify for that second mortgage!

Yes, you only need to send $12.99 to the following addr

Click here to read something completely unrelated to the rest of this comment
--

Yeah, so am I a verified member. All that means is that you have a bank account.

--
Make Money on the 'Net

16.Not a Bank. You acknowledge that (i) the Service is not a banking service (ii) Service accounts are not insured by any government agency of any nation, (iii) the Service is not subject to banking regulations and (iv) PayPal.com will invest in liquid assets and that interest earned on those assets will be the property of PayPal.com.

Second, they don't even guarantee protection themselves:

In order to file a Claim, you must be a Verified User at the time of filing. PayPal will investigate your claim, contact the seller and, if the seller does not present appropriate proof of shipment, a full refund or other evidence of a satisfactory resolution, PayPal will restrict the seller?s account and seek to collect the amount you paid from the seller. You and other buyers who file claims against the same seller will be entitled to the return of any and all funds PayPal is able to collect from the seller, on a first-come, first-served basis. Recovery of your claim is not guaranteed.

Claims must be filed not earlier than 30 days after the date of payment, and not later than 60 days from the date of payment.

The fact that they lie about the so-called "FDIC protection" and the questionable domain registration stuff is enough to make me not send my $250.

It's that "too good to be true" thing, which is hard to face when you really want it to be true.

SP

I used to use Kagi, and their payment rate is on a sliding scale - "Kagi charges 6.5% up to a maximum of $3.00 for our operational costs, plus 3.5% plus $0.50 for processing costs we incurr (credit card fees, etc)."

I'd recieve a payment for a low end hosting account (say about $60.00 under my old scale), and Kagi would take about 10% of that. Plus there's generally over a one month lag in recieving payments from Kagi.

However, Kagi does offer some customization features that paypal doesn't, as well as their registration code system for shareware. Each has there pro's and cons I guess.

Yes, there may be some fraud issues with paypal. There can be anytime you purchase something from someone you don't know. At least with PayPal and Kagi, you're not actually giving the person your credit card number. The reason the credit card companies won't get involved is because you've paid paypal and not the person directly. Paypal hasn't done anything wrong, so the credit card companies can't reverse the charges. If you run into, or suspect a case of fraud, let paypal know about it. And it might be a good idea to read paypal's security help on fraud issues.

When you click "buy now" on the site, it takes you to PayPal to finalize the transaction. PayPal lets you know that the real company you are buying the product from is called, "ECommerce Electronics," and that they are a "verified member."

The business web site listed for Ecommerce Electronics (just a mirror of http://www.gamedvdplayer.com/) is http://www.dvd8050.com/ and a whois search shows the company is from Houston, TX, and this site was registered in July. That doesn't make them seem much more trustworthy. Their servers are standing up pretty well to the slashdot effect, maybe that means something...

Here's the whois record:

Registrant:
E-Commerce Inc
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Domain Name: DVD8050.COM

Administrative Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO32) sales@250dvd.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Technical Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO22) sales@dvd8050.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Billing Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO31) sales@dvd8050.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Registration Date: 19-Jul-2000 19:58:56
Expiration Date: 19-Jul-2001 19:58:56

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.SOG.NET 208.195.144.4

Notice the administrative contact has an email address at 250dvd.com. This site was registered in June 2000 to the same company, Ecommerce Inc. There is more information on 250dvd.com about the product (different views, etc.) but still nothing about any licensing of the Sega games.

When you click "buy now" on the site, it takes you to PayPal to finalize the transaction. PayPal lets you know that the real company you are buying the product from is called, "ECommerce Electronics," and that they are a "verified member."

The business web site listed for Ecommerce Electronics (just a mirror of http://www.gamedvdplayer.com/) is http://www.dvd8050.com/ and a whois search shows the company is from Houston, TX, and this site was registered in July. That doesn't make them seem much more trustworthy. Their servers are standing up pretty well to the slashdot effect, maybe that means something...

Here's the whois record:

Registrant:
E-Commerce Inc
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Domain Name: DVD8050.COM

Administrative Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO32) sales@250dvd.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Technical Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO22) sales@dvd8050.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Billing Contact:
Dunvale, Robert (DURO31) sales@dvd8050.com
5773 Woodway #304
Houston, Tx 77057
US
(PH) 713-785-1556

Registration Date: 19-Jul-2000 19:58:56
Expiration Date: 19-Jul-2001 19:58:56

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.SOG.NET 208.195.144.4

Notice the administrative contact has an email address at 250dvd.com. This site was registered in June 2000 to the same company, Ecommerce Inc. There is more information on 250dvd.com about the product (different views, etc.) but still nothing about any licensing of the Sega games.

All of these corporate attacks on your liberty, all of these draconian restrictions are being paid for by the money YOU spend on corporate-sponsored books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes and trips to the multiplex. If you want it to stop you need to re-orient your priorities and better target your entertainment dollar.

If you like movies, go to Atomfilms or head down to the local art-house cinema that shows truly independent work instead of the mega-mall. If you like music, go to mp3.com or use services like Napster and pay artists you like directly via Fairtunes or Paypal. If you are an artist, release your work to the public under the terms of the OPL and let the public know about your account at Paypal.

Don't spend dime one on anything for sale at Amazon.com. Use your local library instead. If you simply must have some piece of corporate media, buy it used.

The only power these pimps have is the power YOU give them. For the DMCA and everything else the RIAA and MPAA have done to your rights, and plan to do to them in the future, you must choke off their access to the cash they expect to have available to fund their ongoing attacks against you, your family and your children. Hollywood has had a terrible year, box office receipts are way off. Keep it up! Make the first decade of the 21st century a finacial Waterloo for them!

Every one of these abuses flows from the ability of corporate money to pervert your democracy, your birthright. Support alternatives to the corrupt two-party system. One week from today vote Nader or Harry Browne.

Night
Geek Goddess

>Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to
>the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you
>evaluate what you see more critically.

I really like the concept of this. This isn't unlike some of the ideas to use services like PayPal to compensate music artists (long /. discussion here.)

In a way, this is kind of a self-tax, where you get to decide where your tax money goes to. This is a neat idea! Worried about polluting the earth, but you have a long commute? Give 50 cents a gallon for every gallon of gas you use to your favority charity. This is a really interesting concept, thanks for sharing...

By the way, the link to donate to the eff using paypal is here.

-Twid

Connects to a online database (ala the old CDDB or maybe FreeDB)

Figures out who the artist is based on the ID3 tag or based on some "signature" in the MP3 file.

Lets the user tip the artist directly either with a predefined (by the artist) amount, or by an amount the user determines.

The pieces are in place. CDDB-now-gracenote claims to be able to recognize MP3 files. Fairtunes lets people tip artists directly. PayPal lets people send micropayments over the web. Now someone just needs to tie these 3 together and make it easy to use. I wouldn't even mind them skimming some of the tips off the top (so long as the artist recieves at least half). Anyone out there willing/able to create this service? I won't even charge licensing off my idea. ;-)

• I like PayPal because it has millions of users. The only worrisome thing about PayPal is: what is their business model? Right now they are buying marketshare with their $5 giveaways, and they are also suffering the costs of being based on credit cards, but they are not passing on those costs to their users. I hope they have a good plan for going profitable without losing their attractive features. Also PayPal is specifically disinterested in anonymity, which is a very interesting feature to me.

  But in the meantime I love PayPay because they have millions of users and they are a peer-to-peer payment system, so there is nothing to stop PayPal users from using PayPal to buy another currency like e-gold or Mojo. :-)

• E-gold, I like because it has been around a long time, it is peer-to-peer, allows micropayments, and it is dead simple technically. (That's a feature!)

  Also, the e-gold company really sets a high standard for being in-the-open about their business, including the automatically generated, WWW-accessible auditing information on this page. E-gold doesn't smell of that tricky e-business baloney about living off of gullible venture capitalists until that glorious day when they dominate the market and then they'll somehow figure out how to extract a tithe from their customers.

  I really hope that the e-gold on-line statistics page is the forerunner of the next generation of auditing technology.

• Now Mojo Nation I like because it allows really small micropayments ("nano-payments"?), and it can be unconditionally anonymous in the Chaumian sense (although the current version doesn't use that feature since we don't have a license to use Chaum's patent), and it is integrated into the Mojo Nation globally distributed data haven.

  Oh yeah, and I because I helped write it. :-)

  Mojo Nation is not yet at version 1.0 -- the next version that comes out will be 0.9 -- so it still has performance issues and bugs. You'll hear about it when 1.0 comes out, believe me. :-)

In sum, each of these payment systems have unique features, and I hope that we can link them all together to make the overall digital economy bigger and more fluid. I know that there are already several independent market-makers who will buy or sell e-gold in exchange for other kinds of money. E-gold is older than PayPal and the e-gold company encourages such people and gives them publicity on e-gold.com and so forth.

Regards,

Zooko

digital money enthusiast

Chief Hunchback, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow

Matt