I've been thinking today of a word I thought I was inventing when I made a typo on a comment "playment," which I wish would become like "Kleenex" in ten years and enable us to effortlessly, with one click, pay for content online and get creators paid and end the regime of deliberate, engineered Internet copyleftism that has crippled the web for over a decade.
Except, I didn't think of this word, and some essential copyleftists at MIT have already grabbed it, it turns out.
Sigh. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.
As I've said in the debate on piracy, the copyleftists are concern-trolling when they claim they're trying to get ways for artists to be paid, they just don't want them to involve "ineffective" or "futile" DRM or "prosecutorial overreach" or "chill on speech". Nonsense. They aren't serious, of course, because they don't really believe in capitalism to start with, and you can usually flush that out of them after a few rounds of debate. But they pretend that their entrepreneurial Big IT capitalism exploiting the open source cult is "capitalism" and they pretend that university- or government-funded open source work is entrepreneurial and capitalistic, too, especially if they get consulting fees. It's not a real economy for the rest of us.
If they really cared about putting money into artists' pockets, they'd work at that, and more money *would* be in artists' pockets. That's the proof in the pudding! They would do the simplest thing that none of them ever do, and which Kevin Systrom was finally in a position to do and missed his historic chance, and that's couple payment and content display through engineering and enable sharing and payment to go together -- I would call it "playment". The engineering isn't hard; the ideology is. Anil Dash reprimands Systrom for not welding Creative Commons licenses into Instagram - but if he can do that, he can add one more option: COPY IF YOU PAY ME.
That "creative commerce" idea that Larry Rosenthal (c3) invented is exactly the way to go. (I'd be interested to hear what c3 thinks about the MIT white payment on Playment).
CC supporters keep saying that you can't mix "licensing" and "implementation". Of course you can. The Internet mixes things all the time. That's how it gets ahead, routing around.
Google Play isn't playment yet, because you still have to click a few times and still click through to a "shopping card" and credit card information.
But eventually we'll have one-click consumption and payment -- playment.
Right now the closest thing I see to playment is Loren Feldman's site where Tinypass comes up with a 50 cents charge to see a video. This takes you to either your TinyPass account or PayPal which is faster than to Mastercard. Once you make the TinyPass account which is dirt simple, that will speed it up to make your own balance/wallet and then draw it down. This experience is better for the consumer than Google Play.
My only beef with the whole site as it is now is that it kicks up too many emails, in part because Wordpress lets you click to follow, then instead of just accepting that you really wanted to follow, then asks for a confirmation email -- I don't like Wordpress for this and other reasons but I can understand why developers use it because it has all these little modules to plug in.
Tinypass kicks up multiple emails too and this gets annoying, but likely a lot of people want payment confirmation from the payment system AND the pass system. Again, all of this has to get tighter, smoother -- it has to become PLAYMENT. ENJOYMENT.
Playment could operate off your phone and be a wallet, maybe even that Google wallet that never seems to get working and get uptake. The key is micropayments -- a view of a Youtube has to be almost microscopic, but the rewards of tipping a blogger have to be tangible -- and I'm not sure how, except with leader boards and reputational systems that always get gamed. That can be worked on.
So didn't invent the word "playment" -- wouldn't it be funny if this open sourceniks' group already trademarked this term -- but I want a different connotation for the word.
Unfortunately, the MIT group come out of the whole "share" mentality" as you can tell right off the bat when they demand "the opening up of walled gardens". Why? People like walled gardens -- that's why Facebook has a billion members and Diaspora has a team whose member committed suicide and who took a lot of Kickstarter cash and didn't do much with it.
If the site is quoting Tim Berners-Lee on "grassroots innovation" as a solution to the Internet's "universality", we're in trouble. This is not the droid we're looking for, because Tim Berners-Lee is the fellow who welded three deep flaws into the Internet:
o failure to protect privacy
o failure to secure intellectual property
o failure to encourage commerce
It's in spite of TBL that the Internet has thrived, not because of him.
Here's why we know we're in trouble with this version of "playment":
The MIT "playment" people are likely to jealously guard their interpretation of this concept.
Playment is establishing a way for consumers *and* sound recording copyright holders (including both established record companies and independent recording artists) to share and profit from high quality digital music and media distributed via internet websites and peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms as well as via physical media like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs and portable storage devices like external harddrives and pen drives.
Playment aims to be the first and defacto standard implementation of the Open Music Model (OMM) developed at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Playment has adopted and refined the five fundamental requirements of the OMM and is working to clearly define aspects pertaining to content metadata validation (Semantec Web stuff) to facilitate compensation for copyright owners.
In brief, the key concepts of the OMM are:
- Open File Sharing
- Open File Formats
- Open Membership
- Open Payment
- Open Competition
But that doesn't mean the rest of the world can't route around them.
Playment shouldn't require open systems or open standards or open anything which actually slow down innovation and put it in the hands of a cranky few code dictators. There can be a thousand walled gardens and different implementation of different standards or even different standards. You don't need Facebook, Twitter, and G+ to talk to each other, you just need them to talk to the third-party payment system that more seamlessly welds in with their system, the way Seamless is now welding in with restaurants so you can order online more easily.
I think one of the problems for why no third-party payment system ever seems to become ubiquitous, except for Paypal, is that none of these giants like Google or Twitter want to enable a third-party payment system to become bigger than them by serving all three or four.
Metadata validation is the problem that the IETF virtual worlds group that was going to make Second Life and There and the Open Sims all "interoperable". That group failed miserable and got occupied and taken over by the US military, a disastrous development that no one except me has protested. People who need simulations of Afghan villages are just more driven and more resourced than people merely toying with virtual worlds with their own money. I constantly objected on the mailing list for this group that they were leaving out the engineering of copy/mod/transfer which they could easily do just as it had been done in SL, and that only ideology was stopping them. There were ways to address the problem of trusted servers and certificates and engineered as well as organic community solutions. The ideological default against them was too great, however.
Real playment has to start with a robust sense of property, not openness; of law, not code; of community, not collectivization.
My hope is that while the MIT technocommunists are tinkering away with their Playment -- they are still looking for seed investors and evidently Mitch Kapor hasn't become interested -- some real business with a real profit motive and not funded professors and students will have the hunger to make this happen.
Playment is going to have to be about wallets and about in a sense a phone meter but one that doesn't seem to drain the pocketbook and doesn't make the consumer feel that he has yet another high gadget/Internet bill coming in -- it has to have a lot of choice to it.
I'm encouraged by the way I saw Facebook log-on for comments appear everywhere on blogs and become almost the industry standard until TechCrunch went back on this very good way to do things and put in Livefyre, which I've criticized deeply.
TC did this because their comments -- and traffic -- fell off when they had identity. They tried to be noble about it and make it seem like they were willing to gut it out while a better sort of people came to the site (and I would add, especially more women, which is a demographic that won't comment in an environment with tekkie assholes being anonymously nasty).
But they weren't really noble because AOL needed the traffic, so they've now let in Lifefyre which takes Twitter and Disqus log-ons which can be anonymous.
I still think Disqus is good if you have anonymous because it builds up a record you can see with a click and it's very easy to use and manage.
Anyway, the appearance of third-party commenting platforms lets me hope there will be third-party payment solutions that seamlessly -- like Seamless -- get us to real playment, not like the MIT Playment.
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