[advocacy] Happy New Year! RC3 Released!

[Monty]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 10:23:52AM +0000, Daniel James wrote:
> > 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. 

PayPal is neither secure nor a regulated 'bank'.  They could disappear
next year.  I know you were mentioning PayPal as an illustrative
example, but the caution hold.  Well-meaning ideas often cause more
trouble than they're worth.

So, two big reasons we will not and cannot do this:

Xiph,Org is not in the business of running, regulating or enforcing a
micropayment scheme based on our tags.  It would make the liability
burden of swimming in technology-shark infested waters look
comparatively trivial.

The comment header is not intended for this.  Don't abuse the comment spec.

> 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.

The abuses would only *start* there.

Monty

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.