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Humans have a natural desire to own material things.

Moreover, us humans evolved in environments of scarcity, and so we desire what's physically scarce to secure our survival. When faced with abundance, the best survival tactic isn't to hoard it in an attempt to make it artificially scarce for private gain, but to SHARE it with others and gain favors and reputation instead of contempt and a dagger in the back. This is the ancient gift economy, and it needs a modern revival to counter the would-be IP hoarders...

I applaud the author for coming up with a simple term for this concept. After Blender was released under the GLP, I theorized on the Potlatch Wiki, that this model might have a bright future. Developers would release their software as closed or shareware until a certain amount of money was raised, and then release it under a free software license.

One project which is doing this right now is Free Pepper. They are attempting to raise $11,000 to buy the source code of the popular, but discontinued, Pepper programmers' editor for Mac (Pepper 4 was also ported to Windows and Linux).

I never used Pepper but I wanted to push this site because I want this idea -- which now has a name -- to succeed. So check out their site and maybe give 'em a buck or two.

...a license or social contract that emphasizes voluntary payments,...

this is what the potlatch protocol is trying to do - create a means for artists and creators to be rewarded - and honored - for releasing their gifts to the world.

Correct me if I'm wrong but...

well actually most bands get most of their money from signing bonuses and advances. And perhaps merchandise, if they were lucky enough to retain those rights. The chance of actually seeing any money beyond this is slight - even for big stars. Witness Courtney Love's lawsuit, TLC's bankruptcy, etc. (and it's been going on for a long time - listen to Moneygoround by the Kinks, which should be the marching song for those folks trying to start a musicians union.)

The only way forward for music as an art form and as a cultural force (other than as a purely commercial product) is to give control of music back to the musicians. The EFF licence is well-intentioned, but it concentrates on the perspective of the audience, and we need to establish a creative partnership between artists and audiences and eliminate the need for any other parties in the equation.

The bottom line is, musicians need to support homes and families - and their audiences totally understand this - "open sourcing" music only makes sense within a framework in which voluntary payments are brainlessly easy, and socially encouraged. Putting an (o) beside your track should be the same as saying - here's some music we made - give us money and we'll keep making this crazy shit. The street performer protocol is somewhat misnamed , because street perfomers don't withhold music until they are paid, the give it away, and keep doing it as long as enough folks are paying.

So here's the pitch - we're working on an open source business process for musicians - see potlatch.net - the projects kinda been on hiatus for a month or so, but we need it now more than ever. There's a mailing list set up to discuss and develop a 'potlatch protocol' which aims to provide a basic transport layer for voluntary payments.

Everybody needs this - It's now or fucking never -

If Napster can't list music that RIAA owns, it's pointless for them to list music that it doesn't. Indy labels in Napster are like the little CD in the bin next to the 500 copies of something popular. You might grab the little CD because it looks interesting, but you never would've come to the store if the 500 copies of something popular weren't there.

Besides, it's pointless. Copyright is dead. If Napster doesn't survive, something else will. It's like making laws against picking your nose or spitting on the sidewalk. You can scream like howler monkeys every time someone does it and maybe even try to arrest people for it, but you'll never actually make any significant dent in the number of people doing it.

The only solution is to realized that copyright based models for paying artists are dead and think of something better. Here are some links to a couple I've seen:

• The potlach protocol
• The streetperformer protocol
• One of my own that I haven't written up on the web yet

None of those guarantee money to an artist for every person who gets a copy of a work. My suggestion as to how to deal with this is to get over it. I think many of them will work well enough that decent artists will make a good living. All of them significantly diminish the role of the middleman.

a decentralized architecture for gift economies

abstract: A potlatch is a gift festival and an economic system based on abundance, gift, and reputation. The potlatch protocol describes a decentralized peer-to-peer micropayment system based on digitally signed XML promissory notes, aggregated for settlement on an open market. It provides an economic framework that builds upon the "infinite supply" of digital products rather than opposing it, and argues that such a framework is both appropriate and necessary.

OK folks, the ice is definitely melting on this concept. In a world in which you can't prevent people from copying your work, once it's been converted to a digital format, then the only way you're going to get them to pay is on a voluntary basis. We don't think much of the term "tipping" - it might be taken to imply an unequal relationship - we just call it "paying." The fact that it doesn't happen under threat of incarceration is irrelevant - it's still just a payment. Which requires a payment mechanism - some type of negotiable currency that can be transmitted in arbitrarily large or small amounts.

Amazon jumping into this space is clearly a direct attack on paypal's dominance in "what-passes-for-micropayments-nowadays", which is in turn a validation of what paypal is doing. The two biggest problems with the first generation of micropayment systems was

1. ease of use (not)
2. proprietary and patented "standards"

Among on-line payment systems, paypal has done the best job so far of making it easy to send and recieve money - which isn't saying much. As for standards - who knows what patent horrors await us? Presumably one or another of these titans will begin some massive strategic litigation and try to clear, or at least clog up, the field. But while dinosaurs fight, there's some mammals somewhere eating their eggs.

The open source community and the independant music scene needs to join forces. Here's a quote from a recent post to the Pho list:

"I don't know any hacker who doesn't think that musicians should get paid for their music. Some of my hacker friends compose music. I don't know any musicians that aren't excited by the subversive nature of the Internet and peered distribution mechanisms and, consequently, who don't respect hackers. Why don't we both work together, put down our swords, figure out how to put bread in each other's mouths (yes, even hackers are having a harder time than usual with that these days) and subvert the structure that has caused this unnatural schizm between us?"

So what is the nature of this schism? It seems to be related to the fact that the captains of the entertainment industry have emphatically and to a man (I'm betting they're all men) declared an undying jihad against "wholesale copyright infringement", and are willing to, in John Gilmore's words, "... destroy the future of free expression and technological development, so they could sit in easy chairs at the top of the smoking ruins and light their cigars off 'em." Why is it that the media industry has such power that they can appear to dictate the very laws of nature if it is necessary to protect their interests? Do they really stand to lose so much money from file-sharing? (There's not much evidence of this yet...) And why is it that the tail of entertainment is wagging the dog of commerce?

Because it's not about money, it's about control. Culture is the most important commodity because it's the one that sells all the others, not only overtly through advertising, but implicitly, by establishing "social norms", subtle biases, and hidden assumptions. As the content and ads, news and entertainment blend and become one, the public is immersed in a bland and shallow "reality" in which they pretty much go along with anything.

The internet gives independant culture a chance, however slim, to reach a large audience without having to go through the mediation of "the industry" - and this is the greatest terror of partisans of the neo-feudal "new world order". For similar reasons, 'anonymous cash' micropayment systems have been "fumbled" by those who should have been developing and promoting standards - ie. governments and banks - because they see it - quite rightly - as potentially sewing the seeds of their own demise.

An open-source micropayment system could provide a way for fans to pay artists directly, with no middle man. Such a system would have to be established on a "web of trust" model, to avoid any possibility of control by dubious central "authorities". It would require the cooperation of many people, all over the world, to overcome the obvious chicken-and-egg problem, but the history of the net suggests that this may not be as unlikely as it appears. We propose to call this system a potlatch network, after the gift festivals of the northwest coast. Napster et al. is providing one half of a gift economy - we need to complete the circuit by providing a way for fans to support their favorite artists. The implicit contract is an informal version of Kelsey and Shneier's Street Performer Protocol, in which payments are effectively for future works - the carrot rather than the stick: "give us money and we'll release more art." Steven King's experiment was reported as a failure by the New York Times - but he made $600,000 dollars with virtually no expences. (read King's reply to the NYT.)

This not only can work, it is working. What Amazon's doing is an attempt to insinuate themselves into a central position as experiments in voluntary payments (micro- or otherwise) begin to mature. And we all know how much we can trust Amazon, right? We're interested in any insight or assistance in specing out this proposed network, comments welcome - jim at potlatch dot net or visit the url atop this msg for more info.

They really are serious. Now that GWB - or rather, his puppeteers - have their hands on the levers of power, you better believe this shit is coming at us. There's no time to lose, kiddies...

So what does it mean to have a society of abundance? In the part of the world where I accidentally happened to be born (the northwest coast of north america) native societies lived within a social framework in which everything necessary for survival was available in practically unlimited amounts. "Commodities" as we may understand them were essentially free - one only had to go get it, whatever it was - salmon, shellfish, cedar bark, etc.

This pre-columbian leisure society evolved an appropriate social form, which provided a framework for the equitable distribution of wealth, as well as an outlet for competition and sparring for social dominance. The core institution was the Potlatch, a gift festival in which one clan would fete and feast another, which was both an invitiation to enter into a close bond, and a challenge to try to surpass the generosity of the potlatch hosts, at a later time. These went on all winter long, and constituted "the solemn assembly of the tribe" (see Mauss, The Gift, 1950), during which what we would term public policies were debated and enacted.

This institution was particularly well developed in the native american societies from California to Alaska, but it is present in one form or another in every world society, and it is always the reciprocal nature of the gift which is central. This is present in the familiar idea that accepting a gift implies an obligation to return it - not in the literal sense of giving it back (that would be refusing to accept it - a grievous insult) or whipping out your wallet and paying for it (which would be an even greater affront.) And even in the cutthroat and "pragmatic" world of business it is ultimately a very careful balance of favors granted and owed that carries the day - "Godfather, do this small thing for me..." etc.

Potlatch.net exists to promote, propagandize, and experiment with the theory and practice of the gift economy of the future, which is as Gillmore very forcefully suggests, the only way off of the runaway train of corporatism.

The gift economy has hitherto relied on face-to-face contacts, personal relationships. It will be necessary to devise a way to build upon this principle in the "billion channel universe" of the internet. My guess is that we need to develop a network of networks composed of groups of people who actually know one another, who can vouch for each other in meaningful ways. Groups of several hundred people would have an "aggregate reputation" that could be trusted to persist in time, even if a reasonable proportion of members turned out to be flakes.

We don't just need a boston tea party - we need a form of economic power that will allow us to operate from a position of strength and independance. The only practical way to do this will be to devise ways of withdrawing value and services from the current centralized financial system, and placing it in trust of future generations by extending the principles of copyleft and the free software movement into every area of society.

The only way to arrest the 'de-evolution' of our society -- in which what you are is reduced to what you have, and what you have is reduced to what you just think you have -- is to launch a counter-offensive of abundance, a potlatch to which the whole world is invited. A good first step is to take a look at the OpenContent licence for digital works, and start using it, extending it, and educating and encouraging others to use and extend it. A good next step would be to start building local groups in which resources and contributions are freely shared, a pot-luck approach to social organization - and to imagine ways for these local groups to "peer" with one another to allow gifts to be offered and accepted across regional boundaries. to be continued - see http://www.potlatch.net

If the question was, will the artists get paid, you have summed up the situation nicely. short answer, no. If we re-phrase this to ask, how will artists get paid in the era of ubiquitous music-sharing, then this RIAA tax (which is all the BMG deal will amount to) is clearly no answer.

You're right of course about Napster taking it up the ass. But there was no other concievable outcome in this case. Napster has done us all a service by blowing the whole digital music scene wide open, but the fate of Napster is no longer relevant. Presumably they will find some smarmy MoR business model based on their "brand recognition"; the real action is moving elsewhere.

Check out the Tropus project: "napster with anonymity, by christmas 2000". This is intended to be a user-friendly front end for finding music on Freenet. There is already a proposal to integrate this with the MusicBrainz metadata system (conceived as a free and open replacement for the now-proprietary CDDB database.) We're also talking about a peer-based voluntary payment system so that fans can pay the artists directly - lots of info about this idea at Potlatch.net

We have to make sure that the RIAA parasites don't succeed in insinuating themselves between artists and audiences in the P2P space. Obviously they're going to continue to make obscene amounts of money either way, what they fear is a lack of control over what we choose to listen to and to support. So let's keep this freight train rolling - so long Napster, it was fun while it lasted...

but now he's really pissed off!

This is pretty interesting, but the successful implementation of what I'm calling the potlatch protocol will succeed due to it's clone-ability; it's adaptability which equals its adoptability. In other words, it needs to exist now, not in December, and it needs to use the existing plumbing. It's likely that Freenet or something like it will define the future evolution of this new/old economic form, but we gotta be here now kiddies!

Here's something now: a programmable radio station, built with PHP, MySQL and icecast (source code included): spinsystem lets you vote for the next song.

I'll be folding this feature into the next rev. of radio potlatch, but right now I'm at a cabin up the coast, watching the tide come in over the oyster beds and I think I need to go read a book in the sun now...

"The service has an innovative feature that rewards users for uploading and distributing files: payment in a form of digital currency called "Mojo." (from the Wired article lined above)

"My suggestion is to use an aggregate payment system tied in to a database which allows registered members to exchange credits or points on the system - In other words, you charge up your account ... and can then distribute "points" to anyone else on the system." (From this thread at Hack the Planet)

Confirmation once again that like causes produce like effects, and that all events are products of their times. And what times? An historical inflection point, year zero of a new phase in human society. These ideas are everywhere now, "in everyone's heads". A crucial point: systems like this can only work if they are built on open and non-proprietary foundations, (ie. "platforms without the platform vendors" ie. nobody owns it) So all of these similar initiaves need to become interoperable.