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Comment by duckfang | Hacker News Reader

I completely reject Project Xanadu, for one primary reason: it turns an open web into a per-page paywall DRM horror. And where money comes, user tracking and anti-privacy tech follows.

Right now, it takes time and effort to paywall stuff. It's not super hard, but is not a seamless flip-a-switch-on paywall.

With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core - request a page, pay the cost, get the page and hope its what you want. And I can only imagine the level of scrape-scams at that level - spam would be not only viable but make money per click.

Sure, I could imagine useful tools to prevent hemorrhaging money, but the threat of clicking links and owing 1-10$ for that is horrifying.

Hard pass. It does deserve a study in its technology and closed-sourceness when it was devised. But it needs to stay in the scrap-bin of history.

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I don't remember DRM being mentioned in all of the Ted Nelson stuff I've read - I think the idea he had was that just having microtransactions and transclusion would be enough to put copyright concerns aside. This is a sentiment that has aged like a fine milk, of course.

In the Xanadu world, every new book published would be posted online for purchase, but also transcludable; you could remix the work and the transclusion system would ensure the publisher got paid for the part of the work you used by having the system just pass the payments along across each transcluded work. Effectively, you'd publish your remix in the form of a Git diff or IPS file (Ted used the metaphor of Edit Decision Lists) and your browser would just buy the pages of the book that were copied from and paste them into the remixed work.

This is, of course, not how copyright works in the slightest. First off, most people with valuable works do not want to automatically authorize remixes or modifications of their work even if they do get paid. They want to have prior restraint and exclusive license agreements with specific users of their work for the sake of brand maintenance. There is no legal basis for transclusive remixing of content (see Micro Star v. Form Gen). On the flip-side, if someone were to write, say, a review of a work; the copyright owner is entitled to no control or remuneration whatsoever for any quotations you use in that review. That's called "fair use" and it can only be adjudicated by a judge, not a computer program.

BTW, what I'm talking about already exists, it's called YouTube Content ID. YouTube runs literally every upload they have against a database of copyright samples to effectively generate a list of transclusion backlinks after-the-fact. All the problems I mentioned above are problems with YouTube Content ID, not Xanadu - there are plenty of publishers whose policy is "block", and it is their right to do that; making a fair use of content will trip the filters and you have to argue with YouTube to do what you are legally entitled to do, etc. It is entirely an engineer's view of copyright law, which is just laughably bad.

If micropayments, versioning, and bidirectional links are to be mandatory there must be some kind of DRM-like system enforcing that. It's not said because it goes without saying. Of course Nelson pitched this as "for your own good" but so did the RIAA/MPAA.

I’m not seeing why. You purchase a copy of the datum. If someone links to you, they pay a micropayment and ontain their own copy, which they can then sell. It “should” be trivial to set your micropayment to zero if you want.

Because purchasing digital stuff is done within the realm of capitalism, which uses scarcity to guarantee value. If the scarcity is removed or reduced, the price goes down approaching to 0. We saw cost reductions happen with music with Napster, and movies with Bittorrent.

And the way to enforce scarcity with digital stuff means anti-user encryption and rights-reduction with DRM.

And without DRM, a single user "buys" the content, breaks the connection with transclusion, and uploads it for cheaper than legit, or free. Then you're making money on copyright violations - and do you really think the powers that be would allow this system with anonymous accounts/payments/withdrawal? (And there's your user tracking, user attestation, and anti-privacy tech... And just imagine if this account was cancelled due to piracy - ouch.)

> Because purchasing digital stuff is done within the realm of capitalism, which uses scarcity to guarantee value. If the scarcity is removed or reduced, the price goes down approaching to 0. We saw cost reductions happen with music with Napster, and movies with Bittorrent.

Yes, I believe this is why they are called “micropayments.” Its expected that the price will approach zero.

> And the way to enforce scarcity with digital stuff means anti-user encryption and rights-reduction with DRM.

I’m sorry, this seems like a non sequitur. Why are they trying to maintain scarcity again?

> And without DRM, a single user "buys" the content, breaks the connection with transclusion,

Then how would people know the version of the content they have is the same as the content they want?

> and uploads it for cheaper than legit,

You misunderstand. There is no such thing, they own the content, the price they charge for transcluding their copy is their decision. They’re allowed to charge a low price.

> Then you're making money on copyright violations

So its clear that either the law would have to change or people wouldn’t be using this for copyrighted works. This could replace copyright by giving content creators an alternate means of distribution.

> and do you really think the powers that be would allow

No you’re right, might as well just give up and go back to facebook and youtube

> and do you really think the powers that be would allow this system with anonymous accounts/payments/withdrawal? (And there's your user tracking, user attestation, and anti-privacy tech

So basically no problems with Xanadu that you can identify, but a lot of assumptions about society and politics that you believe would make it untenable. Got it.

The Web already has paywalls. Something like xanadu would be an advantage, as at the moment everyone is doing their own poor solution of what xanadu could deliver in a higher quality.

And I also think that xanadu would be impossible to scale up to global level anyway. It would only be another walled garden living on the internet, similar to how there are already wikis and their interwiki-connectivity.

> With Xanadu, that paywall is built in at the core

HTTP also has builtin paywalls via the 402 error code. I'm not sure that there's much practical difference.

Existence of 402 doesn’t really say much. 418 and 451 are probably just as popular error codes as 402, but nobody would argue any of these codes are a material part of the HTTP core. Moreover, there’s no special functional purpose to 402, not in the RFC and not real life.

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