Is The Street Performer Protocol Feasible?

Brian Koehler asks: "With all the news about Napster lately, I'm wondering if the Street Performer Protocol would really work in practice. Does anyone know if this has been studied before? If not, here's a questionaire and here are the results." There weren't many votes when I checked a week ago. You all might want to stop by and let your views be known. We've talked about this before, but this was before Napster was popular, and the highly-visible court case. Have your opinions changed since then?

Re:Add Perks

[Mr. Slippery]

The solution to this problem may be to reward donors with special perks when the media is released...The perks may be more difficult to award for other media types, such as music, games, or movies, where there may not be any significant advantage to having a physical copy.

Blatant self-promotion: I'm working on a system that would allow donors the perk of placing a sponsored link on a website. The more they donate, the more often that link would be shown. I've just about got an initial version coded up, and could use some folks to help test it. Check it out: sponsorpool.infamous.net [infamous.net].

Re:wont fly.

[dvize]

1. It need not cost the publisher much to "publish" a [data object] under this protocol, so there would be little need to turn down requests (unless the publisher wished to maintain a certain level of quality in its [published objects]) (most publishers won't publish crap)

2. if (a) place(s) were made available to list works published under this model (sorted into different categories) I think more people would at least consider looking at the products.

sort of like freshmeat [freshmeat.net]

but not entirely

Stephen King is doing this right now

[RhetoricalQuestion]

And it came up on slashdot on Monday, July 24th. Read the article right here. [slashdot.org]

If I recall correctly, (the post I read this in is buried somewhere) the experiment is going fairly well so far. Though mind you, between the novelty of it, and the strengh of the Stephen King Name, it's difficult to say how good a test this will be.

Add Perks

[SagSaw]

In the US, apathy is a common trait. I think many people will simply take the attitude that "If I don't make a donation, someone else will. The music/game/movie/etc will be published whether I donate or not, so why sould I donate?" The solution to this problem may be to reward donors with special perks when the media is released.

For example, the donors to a novel may receive a high-quality, hard-bound edition of the novel. Although anyone would be able to obtain a free electronic copy of the book, and eventually, without copyrights, anyone woud be aboe to obtain a printed copy of the book, there would be a large number of people who would be willing to pay a premium to have a hard-copy edition as soon as the book is released. Additionally, if the quantity of this origional release is limited, it may become a collector's item, further increasing the tendency of people to donate.

The perks may be more difficult to award for other media types, such as music, games, or movies, where there may not be any significant advantage to having a physical copy. For a game or on-line service, donors may be given, based on the amount of their donation, the right to pick their usernames, nicks, or aliases first. Many people would be willing to pay extra to be JohnSmith rather than J-Smith-56382.

Personally, I think The Street Performer Protocol is an interesting concept which is much better than micropayment or MPAA tactics which, sadly, is the way electronic media appears to be heading.

wont fly.

[Zurk]

it will only work for well known authors. supposing i wanted to write a book, wrote several chapters..gave it to a publisher under this protocol. would he pay me ? unlikely. would anyone bother to look at it ? nope. only well known/established authors could hope to make this fly. mark me down if you will - but the same is true of code released under the GPL. without an established base of fans/supporters - you go nowhere. and thats the main reason open source doesnt fly in the real world.

principles that also correspond to real-life

[rimmah]

now think of it this way, when you see a busker/street performer on the street you usually toss them a coin and hope they go away, perhaps the same thing will go for the unknown authors. If you had, say for example a e-book by agatha christie and another one by someone you've never heard of, which one would you rather pick for value?

Re:wont fly.

[Zurk]

ok, youre a troll but let me address your points. :-
under the traditional process marketing muscle is leveraged, publishers have contacts with bookstores to promote the books etc...even if you are an unknown author. advertising budgets are also available to promote. theres a lot of stuff going around behind the scenes - ive been there.
apache, perl etc are all failures. yes, they are great. yes, people use them. ask yourself why the apache software foundation is non profit. why there is no company which sells perl. why GCC etc cant be sold in the quantities M$ visual C++ is..even though its far superior.. why emacs is not sold like M$ word is. why linus torvalds who wrote linux never made any money of it. linus doesnt even work on a pure linux job. Then ask yourself if they are true commercial sucesses. yes, redhat makes money - but the main money is made with support. not by *selling* the product. you cant sell something people download off the web. did you know concorde has been a failure even if its seen as the fastest aircraft there is ? it doesnt turn a profit - the R&D costs were too high. In the real world of companies which HAVE to survive and generate revenues, working products dont count - the bottom line ALWAYS is more important. have there been some success with GPLed/free products - sure. is there more profit with closed source - YUP. thats why M$ has profits in the BILLIONS. wake up kid - this is reality.
Yup. my email address definitely makes me a looser. real mature.