Re: Is PaySwarm usable by individuals? (was: Is DRM in scope? ...)

On 08/28/2011 02:21 PM, Steven Rowat wrote:
> On 8/27/11 10:43 AM, Manu Sporny wrote:
>> What we should talk about, however, are certificates of authenticity
>> that acknowledge that what you are about to purchase has been verified
>> and is being offered by Sony Pictures, or Universal or Pixar.
>> ...[snip]...
>>
>> PaySwarm absolutely does provide this certificate of authenticity
>> mechanism as it is implemented today.
>
> Agreed that this is important.
>
> However, I note that your examples here are corporate. My use case
> examples, and my interest, are in individuals selling their own work
> directly; I believe this is where a true revolution in human
> communication could be generated.

I agree. If this solution doesn't work for any individual, we have failed.

> Are you as sure of, and as committed
> to, WebPayments/PaySwarm being user-friendly enough that single
> individuals can make use of it?

Absolutely. Like the Web, this is not merely a tool for large 
corporations - it is a tool for any person on the Web that wants to sell 
something that they've created.

> Or is there a reasonable danger that it
> is going to require an expert hired on to facilitate the web payments,
> so that it will only be affordable by a company?

No. Simplicity is a goal. Some of the software aspects are a bit tricky 
to implement, but those bits can be wrapped up in software libraries 
just like SSL has been for years. If you look at the PaySwarm demo:

http://payswarm.com/wiki/WordPress_Recipes_Demo

... you will notice that it runs on a basic WordPress installation. The 
PaySwarm bits are implemented as a simple WordPress plugin. The client 
source code for that plugin is available here:

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress

As you can see, it's just a handful of PHP files for a PaySwarm client. 
We are currently trying to simplify it even further by removing the 
OAuth 1.0a dependency and going to digitally signed messages.

> My belief is that a W3C supported universal web-payments standard should
> be targeted at least as much at individuals as at institutions; and that
> people who merely 'use' the Internet (including for instance scientists,
> journalists and musicians on the producer end and purchasers of their
> work on the consumer end) who might have no working knowledge of web
> programming languages, nor any other need for them in their life, should
> find the web payments at least as transparent to use as purchasing a
> widget with a credit-card is on the web currently.

Yes, absolutely. The folks at Digital Bazaar share your belief.

That is one of the reasons that we have the WordPress demo - to show 
that you just need a blog and you can start selling digital content via 
WordPress. Write your blog post, set the part that is viewable for free 
and the part that must be paid for, set the price and publish. That's it.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Uber Comparison of RDFa, Microformats and Microdata
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/uber-comparison-rdfa-md-uf/

Received on Sunday, 28 August 2011 23:31:06 UTC