💾 Archived View for gemini.thegonz.net › glog › 220607-progressiveStreetPerformerProtocol.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:16:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The Progressive Street Performer Protocol

The "Street Performer Protocol" is a classic vision for how creative works could be funded without using copyright to prevent copying. In short, the work is released only once people have pledged enough money to pass a threshold set by the creator.

gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/view?Threshold+pledge+system

It's a neat idea, but it hasn't led to the great flowering of expensively produced Free Culture works we dreamt of. I'll let you come up with your own theories as to why.

Here's a variant which I haven't seen discussed, which I hereby dub the "Progressive Street Performer Protocol" (PSPP), or maybe the "Progressive Ransom Model" (PRM). It applies most naturally to film or music, so I'll describe it in those cases.

As in the original SPP, you first produce the entire work, and set a threshold level at which you would be willing to release it, covering costs and a suitable level of profit. Next you accept money from the crowd; but rather than wait until they have pledged the threshold into escrow before you release anything, progressively release the work in proportion to the money you receive as soon as you receive it. So if your threshold is 1000 Zorkmids for a 1000 second piece, say, then every time someone sends you n Zorkmids you immediately release the next n seconds.

The main advantage, which is what makes me suspect it might actually work, is that contributors will immediately see and benefit from their contribution. It also somewhat gets around the need to somehow first build a fanbase who would trust you enough to pay upfront for your latest work, since the quality of the piece will become clear progressively. It also plays into the natural tendency for people to get "hooked" and want to see what's next.

Technically, a neat simple way to implement this would be by seeding a torrent with small chunk size, and only seeding the first n chunks. The analogous thing with IPFS might be even more appropriate (possibly with trickle-dag). But you could imagine more sophisticated approaches with mass-market appeal, e.g. a streaming video system which presents the user with a "pay now" screen when they approach the paywall at the end of what's been released so far.

I described it in terms of seconds, but the same idea would obviously apply to textual works. It doesn't really work for software in general, but it could plausibly work for the static "content" of games.

This feels like a natural idea which must have come up before, but I can't find anything on it. Does anyone know anything about it, or want to point out some terrible flaw I'm missing? Currently, I'm imagining that something like this will be the business model the creative industries resort to once they finally give up in their war against copying.