> I keep throwing it around and if I ever met a few folks interested in trying it I'd definitely be up for giving it a major go - I think its the inevitable "maximal" solution to intellectual content.
I've looked at business models for all-open content with strong attribution. One question is, how do you protect the business from free-riding competitors who are better capitalized and want to "enclose the public commons"? There have been a few promising efforts in crowdfunding of creative activity, where the resulting content was owned by the creators, e.g.
- (YC) Beacon for journalism
- Star Citizen game ($40M+ raised to date, for 1 game)
- Minecraft did well in selling alpha software
These models seem to work best when there is a strong community invested in using the creative work, and interested in funding roadmaps. Payment infrastructure for DIY crowdfunding continues to improve: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/09/your-guide-to-diy-crow... . PayPal's API can split a payment between several parties, e.g. 5% to patronage platform.
When DRM gets implemented in the browser (starting with video, but will inevitably be extended to ePub3 ebooks and thus any web page), public awareness will skyrocket with "no-can-do" messages that users will experience several times a day. Google can pull the rug out from Firefox whenever they want, making Chrome (and app store policies) as much a point of influence as Google Panda.
The low-cost way to get started is not to host content, but to create a decentralized directory based on crowd-sourced metadata (itself public domain) for public domain content. Start off by collecting the Top 500 most-viewed public domain items from: Youtube, Soundcloud, Universities, Internet Archive, Libraries/Museums. If that gets traction as a proof of concept, it can be scaled up.
In the short term, Qt (have you seen QtBitcoinTrader?) and luajit could form the base of a modern version of Groove/Chandler that runs on Mac/Linux/Windows. Medium term could incorporate concepts from secushare (p2p), camlistore (CCNx), askemos (trust) and tinc vpn.
In the long term, this needs to become a new operating system, borrowing concepts from Rebol, Plan9, Ethos OS, Genode, Qubes OS, etc. Then it can run on dedicated in-home hardware with virtualization and always-on connectvity to trusted peers and mobile devices. But that pipe dream requires success from earlier, simpler to deploy products :) Ping me if you want to brainstorm.
Just as an aside, I don't think ePub3 is going anywhere. Last time I looked it was an unholy mess and likely to remain so.
As less of an aside, I think CC sharing and direct crowdfunding is the way things will go for creators.
The only thing labels and distributors bring to the table for artists is public access, sponsorship, and promotion. A public creative network would bypass the first, support direct funding for the second, and promotion would become by fans for fans.
I see no bad here - and if it means an end-run around the monopsonies and the death of the ad networks, even better.
Yes, ePub3 does seem to have entangled itself. But something like it will likely emerge as a DRM-enabled HTML(5+) standard for portable offline "documents", including scriptable audio/video that supports deep linking for viral marketing. Publishers and authors need an alternative to Amazon.
Scaling communities is hard, e.g. see this analysis of the fall (no surprise) in Wikipedia contributions:
We need multiple, competing, public creative networks which agree on interoperable standards for content and artist identity/marketing. This avoids the need for one planetwide network, e.g. networks can rise/fall by genre, geography, fictional universe, etc. Consumers and artists would gain access to an ever-growing public commons and multiple distribution channels/perspectives with low switching cost. As with open-source, it should be relatively easy for communities to "fork", without cultural or economic zero-sum conflict, though there will be competition for talent.
I've looked at business models for all-open content with strong attribution. One question is, how do you protect the business from free-riding competitors who are better capitalized and want to "enclose the public commons"? There have been a few promising efforts in crowdfunding of creative activity, where the resulting content was owned by the creators, e.g.
- (YC) Beacon for journalism
- Star Citizen game ($40M+ raised to date, for 1 game)
- Minecraft did well in selling alpha software
These models seem to work best when there is a strong community invested in using the creative work, and interested in funding roadmaps. Payment infrastructure for DIY crowdfunding continues to improve: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/09/your-guide-to-diy-crow... . PayPal's API can split a payment between several parties, e.g. 5% to patronage platform.
When DRM gets implemented in the browser (starting with video, but will inevitably be extended to ePub3 ebooks and thus any web page), public awareness will skyrocket with "no-can-do" messages that users will experience several times a day. Google can pull the rug out from Firefox whenever they want, making Chrome (and app store policies) as much a point of influence as Google Panda.
The low-cost way to get started is not to host content, but to create a decentralized directory based on crowd-sourced metadata (itself public domain) for public domain content. Start off by collecting the Top 500 most-viewed public domain items from: Youtube, Soundcloud, Universities, Internet Archive, Libraries/Museums. If that gets traction as a proof of concept, it can be scaled up.
In the short term, Qt (have you seen QtBitcoinTrader?) and luajit could form the base of a modern version of Groove/Chandler that runs on Mac/Linux/Windows. Medium term could incorporate concepts from secushare (p2p), camlistore (CCNx), askemos (trust) and tinc vpn.
In the long term, this needs to become a new operating system, borrowing concepts from Rebol, Plan9, Ethos OS, Genode, Qubes OS, etc. Then it can run on dedicated in-home hardware with virtualization and always-on connectvity to trusted peers and mobile devices. But that pipe dream requires success from earlier, simpler to deploy products :) Ping me if you want to brainstorm.