[advocacy] Happy New Year! RC3 Released!

[Daniel James]

> Should you wish to support our efforts financially towards RC4 and
> 1.0, please send your donations via PayPal to donate at xiph.org.

Perhaps we can work PayPal (or a similar scheme) into the Ogg 
specification in such a way that we can counter accusations that 
Vorbis is not 'secure', or that it rips off artists. Since the rival 
proprietary codec manufacturers can't complain about quality or price 
gouging licences, I figure this will be their line of attack against 
1.0. 

A dedicated comment tag in a Vorbis music file which referred to a 
PayPal address would be a lot simpler than signing the file with 
encryption. Then, player software could support the tag with a 
'Donate to Artist' button - an optional payment, of course. A 
suggested level of US $1 or 1 Euro could be set, but it would be up 
to the listener to choose the amount.

It's compatible with peer-to-peer file sharing, and doesn't require a 
middleman who might expect rights over the music. I expect PayPal 
might take a cut (in future if they don't already), but that's 
reasonable for processing the financial transaction.  I expect it 
would be a popular idea with artists.

The only drawback I can see is that people might want to change the 
PayPal tag before passing on the file in a p2p network, in order to 
divert cash to their own account. Not a lot you could do about that - 
since you could make an analogue source version of any music, however 
encrypted, and do it - but I guess it might lead to the culprit 
losing their PayPal account.

What do the developers think about the technical feasibility of 
including such a tag as standard?

Daniel

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