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Subject: (Not!) Another micropayment protocol [was: Kill the RIAA: a protocol]
From: Jeff Kandt (jeffscrollbar.com)
Date: Sat Jul 29 2000 - 02:52:43 CDT

>I don't see why yet another micropayment protocol is needed.

Fine, except that this is _not_ another micropayment protocol. In
fact it is payment-method agnostic. I apologize if I was unclear.

Paul Snively recently posted a good summary of what the protocol
tries to accomplish:

>"The non-technical principle behind the protocol, in my mind, is
>that it needs to be possible to establish an authenticated Internet
>connection to the copyright holder of an MP3 (or Vorbis, or other
>popular or we-hope-soon-to-be-popular audio format) as easily as
>possible so as to proffer payment for the content using an arbitrary
>Internet-based payment system..."
[From http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1517 ]

One of the goals is that as various payment systems come and go in
the marketplace without having to re-tag existing files. Therefore
the method of payment is mutually negotiated after the connection is
made, and is not specified in the connection protocol itself. The
server may offer several ways to pay, in which case the client gets
to choose which one (if any) it supports or prefers.

Paul Snively continues:
>The ease is likely to be a function of the necessary information
>being coded in the MP3/Vorbis/whatever itself. The authentication
>(how do we know we're really tipping Courtney Love and not getting
>cracked?) is likely to be a function of a combination of public-key
>cryptography and cryptographic hashing. Some of the issues that need
>to be addressed are key management and trust (key creation, key
>distribution, key revocation, and key trust via either the
>traditional (read: bankrupt) CA methodology or via the PGP-style
>(read: superior) web of trust model), the creation of a distributed
>service model so that there is no single point of failure that will
>prevent compensation from reaching the copyright holder, and size
>issues with respect to how much data can be stored in an MP3 or
>Vorbis file/stream's metadata.
[Also from http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1517 ]

I'd encourage anyone who dismissed this as similar to existing
micropayment protocols to read the the rest of Paul's message above,
and the ones from my original post (below).

If people still think this is off-topic for coderpunks, let me know.

The protocol description:
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1469

Follow up clarifications and enhancements:
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1477
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1491
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1488
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1481
http://wmf.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$1473

-Jeff 

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