Re: Comments on MicroPayments and the Web

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

From: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
> I think it would be interesting to see how copyright law will be applied to the
> Web if micropayments ever become popular.  Would memory or disk caching be
> considered fair use?  If so, then people could just set up a very large disk
> cache and maybe delete it every month or so.  It would also be a pretty neat
> hack to use a proxy that only cached pages that charged micropayments.
> Companies would not make a lot of money from things like this.  If disk caching
> was not considered to be fair use, people would still turn it on anyway.

Where does the money come from to run this proxy?

Consider two sites, one which acts as a proxy and cache but which
charges something under a penny per page, and another which acts for
free.  Won't the for-pay site be able to afford a larger disk, more
servers, and better net connections?  It will be a superior service.

Micropayments will allow new services and improved quality over what we
have today where we have to rely on charity and advertising as
motivations for much of what we find on the web.

Hal