Show HN: Pirate.kred – Tipjar DNS for Pirates to pay authors

Hi all, I am excited to introduce to you pirate.kred

Bit of backstory on me, about 5 years ago I created a way for people to easily pay downstream devs of github repos called payitfwd.dev. The point being that a popular repo by a project owned by Vercel doesn't need direct donations, but the maintainer of a dependency might need that money. Here is an example link: https://payitfwd.dev/sindresorhus/is-npm

Recently there has been discourse about "if buying isn't owning..." and this got me thinking, if piracy isn't going anywhere then the big studios aren't the only ones who will suffer. And studies have shown that those who traverse the high seas are willing to pay once able to. So I built pirate.kred - a simple site which matches all sorts of links (amazon listings, magnet links, torrent hashes, etc.) to ISBNs and then ISBNs to ISNIs and Wikidata IDs (basically ISBNs for authors/creators) and then tries to traverse each profile until a payment/donation page is detected.

This way pirates, or sites that pirates use, can easily have a way to get to the original authors/creators payment page and leave a "tip".

Hopefully that makes sense. I am thinking about open sourcing it and possibly starting a discord (or open source alternative) community to help with the moderation of the generated links.

this is more of a proof-of-concept at the moment and will probably need a lot of work. The major issue is that most authors don't have up to date ISNI details (which they can provide by going to ISNI authorities like Library of Congress, British Library, etc.) or they don't have their substacks in their wikidata page. We do not want to be an authority on these links because its too easy to abuse the system if pirate.kred allows people to claim authorship/update links on their own.

If you are an author, the easiest way to get pirate.kred to link your works to your payment page is to create a substack and add that substack link to your wikidata.

Thank you.