Slashdot Mirror

Comic artist Scott McCloud, author of Reinventing Comics, has voiced his own opinions on this issue in a series of online comics.
Part 1
Part 2

Most prior Napster users were teenagers who simply didn't want to shell out a few bucks to get the latest Britney album.

"Didn't want" and "couldn't afford" are different things. I doubt there is any malice or intend to steal. They just want to get music they love but can't really afford. They recognize on a gut level that they aren't stealing in any traditional sense. Scott McCloud summarized this well in I Can't Stop Thinking #6 (warning graphic heavy).

Furthermore, maybe those of us who use Napster, Gnutella, and similar systems to sample new music are a minority, but I think we're a significant share. Most of my professional technical friends use such systems. Most of them us them to sample new music. All of them spend a great deal of money on music.

No I believe that the future of supporting web sites is Micropayments. It's clear that advertising makes for content that is worse, as evidenced by the enormous discrepancy between the quality of network tv, and premium channels such as HBO.

Sounds to me like this is a micropayment system of sorts. Whether the article is talking about ISP's having to pay for the bandwidth of sites or the contents of sites is irrelevant. It is the same thing; a way to compensate sites for the costs incurred in running a site. There are a lot of people that would like to post free content, but we all know how expensive running a site can be. So, ISPs pay a buck, and no banner ads. Or the sites can still use banner ads to help pay for the actual content. This implies artists could finally be getting paid. Sound great to me.

For those of you who would like to read past commentary on the subject, please check out Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?, the Slashdot thread on Scott's Cartoon and the actual cartoon, the Slashdot thread on the second Scott cartoon, and the actual second cartoon, and here is the result of a google search on the topic.

I also just have to mention that I do believe that is one of the longest stories I have seen on the main page ever. Usually, you have the snippet, then more detail when you click the link. Wow, that was shocking to my eyes trying to read all that text in one paragraph.

Sounds to me like this is a micropayment system of sorts. Whether the article is talking about ISP's having to pay for the bandwidth of sites or the contents of sites is irrelevant. It is the same thing; a way to compensate sites for the costs incurred in running a site. There are a lot of people that would like to post free content, but we all know how expensive running a site can be. So, ISPs pay a buck, and no banner ads. Or the sites can still use banner ads to help pay for the actual content. This implies artists could finally be getting paid. Sound great to me.

For those of you who would like to read past commentary on the subject, please check out Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?, the Slashdot thread on Scott's Cartoon and the actual cartoon, the Slashdot thread on the second Scott cartoon, and the actual second cartoon, and here is the result of a google search on the topic.

I also just have to mention that I do believe that is one of the longest stories I have seen on the main page ever. Usually, you have the snippet, then more detail when you click the link. Wow, that was shocking to my eyes trying to read all that text in one paragraph.

Consumer Carl is web-surfing and comes across Vendor Vinny's website, which advertises something interesting to Carl, maybe an attractive GIF image to which Vinny holds the copyright, but he's willing to sell the image to Carl at a small fee. This sale does not entitle Carl to resell the image; he is licensing the image, not becoming its copyright holder. Let's suppose that Vinny is selling this image for a nickel.

One immediate problem Carl faces is determining that Vinny really has something worth a nickel. Vinny may offer a free low-res or blurry image to suggest what he's got, but ultimately Vinny can defect by accepting Carl's nickel and giving him nothing, or something obviously worthless. For now I will put aside this question and assume that defecting vendors will be selected against by market forces.

Carl isn't really going to mail a nickel to Vinny; a stamp costs more than a nickel. What Carl will do is agree to mail a $5 check to Vinny if a fair roulette wheel spin gives a prespecified outcome whose probability is 1/100. The roulette wheel will actually be a negotiation between Vinny and Carl.

At the beginning of the negotiation, Vinny generates Rv, a large random integer, and then computes H, a one-way hash of Rv. Vinny transmits H to Carl. After he receives H, Carl generates his own random number Rc and transmits it to Vinny. Upon receipt of the value of Rc, Vinny transmits Rv to Carl. Carl computes the hash of Rv to verify that it is equal to H. Both of them can now compute the roulette wheel spin value, which is ((Rv + Rc) mod 100), and if the value of the spin is zero, then Carl agrees to mail a check for $5.

In order to cheat, either party would need to manipulate the value of ((Rv+Rc) mod 100). Vinny can't cheat because he has committed to the value of Rv before Carl generates Rc, and Carl can use H to test his commitment. Carl can't cheat because he must generate Rc and transmit it to Vinny before he sees the value of Rv. Carl can't compute Rv from H because the hash function is one-way.

Both parties have equal amounts of work to do. Each must generate a large random integer and perform a one-way hash.

If it turns out that Carl must pay the check, Vinny's website will create a transcation record in Vinny's database, including a transaction number. Carl's browser will show a form, which Carl should print out or copy onto a piece of paper, giving the transaction number as well as Vinny's name and address, so that Carl has an easy time making his payment.

It is prominently obvious to Carl that the transaction has been recorded; if he welches on the check then Vinny will know about it, and Vinny may then deny him access to any other payable goods. There's the question of how Vinny can tell whether a later visitor is the same person who welched before; Carl could make up a new user-id, or telnet to a different host and visit from there to have a different IP address, or do other tricks, but these fall outside the scope of this protocol.

How hard would it be for a single vendor (say, Scott McCloud) to set up a system like this? He would need to provide the client-side executable for his visitors to perform their side of the protocol. He would need to explain the protocol clearly enough to convince them that it's fair. His customers would need to agree to the probabilistic micropayment idea at all, but that's actually easy enough to do: he puts a link from his website that says, "go here if you agree to the probabilistic micropayment protocol, and you can shop for stuff", and they go there and get to see low-res fuzzy versions of interesting and amusing comics. When they do the protocol, they get the high-res sharp versions, and in 1% of the cases, they are obliged to mail in a check.

My apologies for a repeat post, but I goofed on what I actually wanted to reply to. The links in here point to Scott (Zot!, Understanding/Reinventing Comics)McCloud's "I Can't Stop Thinking" "columns" where he gives his take on micropayments:
Coin of the Realm #1
Coin of the Realm #2

I Can't Stop Thinking #5

and

I Can't Stop Thinking #6

Excellent point, penguinboy.

I say stick with mp3, the quality is great, contrary to what some people say. So it doesn't support secure transferal to the user - who cares?

Change your pricing strategy (see the micropayments article).

A lot of people are posting comments to the effect of "micropayments are broken because it takes more too much work/requires you to give out too much information to work." His first strip agrees with you. He's asking someone to set up a system where you enter information once in a secure form and reuse that information anywhere you want to send a payment. Then you click a button on the website to pay him, no matter where that website is, and ten cents comes out. (I would add the condition that you can cancel the bill within a certain amount of time to protect against being tricked into paying money.)

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Scott McLoud has a comic/essay on this at: http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-5/ics t-5.html

".. for small amounts, the process should be as simple as a single click."

So do we have a patent problem here?

Also, on a different topic: people make these kinds of donations now. Look at FuckedCompany's Edgewater victims fund: over $16K in just a couple of weeks, using PayPal. So perhaps we're not as far away as you think.

The practical applications are endless. Even when I only think about comics: Right now, good comics that convey a political or scientific message are rare. But imagine: On Kuro5hin, you get 1000 users to vote on a story -- why shouldn't the same 1000 users donate 10 cents to the production of a comic? And the resulting art would be free to reproduce wherever you like. I would really like to see a good, free evolution theory comic in response to Jack Chick's creationist *$()=).

Now, think about what could be done on sites like Slashdot -- imagine the Slashdot effect with "money-URLs". Slashdot's weekly worthy cause: "Donate 1$ to the EFF" == 10000$ in donations. "Donate 1$ to help this college student get a good lawyer." "Donate 1$ to build a school in Cambodia."

Now that you think about it, doesn't it sound suspiciously like the powers that be may be afraid of our combined monetary power? And even if this is not the case, do we really want a central Microsoft bank that controls our money flow?

Where is the open-source movement when you really need it? This is one of the most important battles of the 21st century -- I'm not exaggerating, consider that this payment method will be applied macro and micro, for shopping as well as for donating.

Why don't we have an open micropayment foundation, and an open-source bank, with Richard Stallman as the director? Heck, I'll even settle for Natalie Portman, but really -- the crypto is out there, writing a browser plugin shouldn't be that hard. A mini fee (say 1/10 cent per transaction) might be used to pay the bank, surpluses go to the EFF. What are we waiting for?

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..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.

I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).

What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.

And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.

The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?