Re: Payment Protected Resources -- Using HTTP 402

Hi Melvin,


On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com>wrote:

> Many of us are now using web ACLs on a regular basis.
>
> A rule may look like:
>
> <>
>     <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#accessTo> <.>, <> ;
>     <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#agent> <http://melvincarvalho.com/#me>
> ;
>     <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#mode> <
> http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#Read>, <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/acl#Write>
> .
>
> This essentially says that my user ID can have read and write access to
> the named resource.
>
> I thought it might be an interesting idea to extend this type of access
> control to allow payment protected resources.
>
> So each server will maintain a balance for each user, as is typical with
> many commercial business models these days.
>
> If the user does not have any credit the server will return a 402 HTTP
> response code, explaining the cost of the item and how they can top up
> their balance.  This could either be via a traditional payment method such
> as Euros, or, say, via a balance in crypto currencies, or as part of a
> loyalty / reward scheme that the web site issues.
>
> I'm wondering if we can extend the vocab we have to add payments?
>
> Perhaps a simple way would be to subclass #accessTo with #paidAccessTo
>

Why do you want to extend the WAC vocabulary? Why not just define that
relation outside WAC -- maybe in a Web payments vocabulary -- and instead
use it together with WAC? You also have to consider servers that do not do
Web payments. How would they interpret that rule if I switch from a server
supporting this feature to a server that does not support it?

-- Andrei


>
> Then have in the ACL rule a simple payment amount (or rule)
>
> Then say something like:
>
> <#amount>  0.001^^BTC
>
> Anyone have any thoughts on whether this could be implemented?
>