Economics of paying app devs for GETs

Why is it a security problem?

You upload your app that provides “paid” access to a popular content.
Once if gets cached, you stop getting paid for it. Wouldn’t that be a problem?

If that’s how apps (don’t) get paid, then I can create a small script that fetches popular apps on a regular basis (before they expire from cache) to make their revenues remain close to nothing.

Not really. People create open source software all of the time and are not paid a dime for it.

The fact that the network pays them doesn’t mean that they are entitled to every dime they could conceive of being paid. The network pays them what it pays them. That’s better than what they are getting now.

That’s a pretty nihilistic response, but thankfully I consume more than I produce (in terms of data volume).

Wow, that sounds super horrible.

Can anyone confirm this? @core_devs?

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Seems to have been discussed before : Can I exploit content rewards by accessing my public content repeatedly: - #7 by neo

Yes, you are right people make OSS all the time and don’t get paid for it. What I think you are disregarding is that, should people be able to get paid via the network (and not via the users themselves), then we might see new people making new software that otherwise wouldn’t have been available for free to the end-user.

I am one of those people. I, frankly, don’t want to work for several years on a game project, only to make a pittance. The requirements budget-wise of a game project are enormous, and so if the potential income maxes out when the downloads continually get cached, then this will limit the potential of what I can release on the SAFE network, at least without directly selling it to end-users.

I have zero problem with working on pieces of code here and there and contributing to OSS without recompense. But undertaking a large project, well, I’ve gotta pay the bills, too. The original vision I had of the SAFE network was that finally (finally!) there would be a place where I could distribute easily (without a publisher sucking up profits) to however many users wanted to play my game, and still look forward to receiving a handsome sum to offset my costs, and perhaps make some profit as well, all without the end-user paying a cent!

To make all this better, I could release it open-source, because there would be no incentive to copy my game when people could simply download it for free via SAFE anyway. A cap on income changes the whole equation.

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I didn’t write it, I have just read the papers, watched the videos, and watched this forum long enough to know what the answers have been.

People always throw out numbers like “pitance” or "enormous’ etc etc. The truth is nobody knows.

If you want to release your software on safe as a commercial venture, I suspect there will be ways to do that… Everything is encrypted, only people you allow to see certain files can see certain files etc…

For the most part SAFE is an open source venture - and the aim of the developer rewards was to reward developers., without them having to raise funds or sell out to corporate etc… Don’t believe the Scaremongers who speculate “it will be a pittance” because 1 that isn’t the aim – and 2 whatever it is is better than what the current system delivers…

SAFE delivers change for the good. If it isn’t good enough, then find a better venue — But until it is built and tested and adopted EVERYTHING is purely speculation. The developers have intent which they have expressed and I suspect the system will be engineered to attempt to the best of their ability to meet their intent.

Fair point.

First, I support SAFE for many different reasons. The current internet is abominable, with security leaks and spying and data loss everywhere. SAFE will ostensibly solve these issues. Ideologically, I’m a libertarian/anarchist, and so I find breaches of my (and everybody else’s) privacy disgusting. So I’m not the type to remove my support based on one aspect. But whether I design a game on the network, potentially costing millions of dollars, rests upon whether I will go broke doing so.

Yes, and upon my introduction to the network via the crowdsale (which I participated in) and the maidsafe.net website, one of the branches of this intent was that popular apps would be rewarded based on their popularity. So the potential I saw here, was that finally I could release open source games, but still not have to ‘give them away for free’. People could review the code to ensure I wasn’t making a backdoor in their machine (and all of the other benefits of OSS), but I would still get the benefits of actually marketing my game.

The benefits to society of this, if it were to become reality, would be enormous, not just for me as a developer, but for people in general. It would be like a bridge between the current paradigm of OSS, and proprietary software (at least to some extent). While people wouldn’t make obscene amounts of money, they would make (hopefully) a good earn, while users would be able to feel secure in the knowledge that their software was reviewable.

I’m not knocking the network in general. Not at all. I was just pointing out that if caching results in lowered income, then the lowered income will result in the fundamental economics changing, and this will change what is released on the network. And that would be a shame.

However, I’ve just read a comment @dirvine made on Can I exploit content rewards by accessing my public content repeatedly: - #28 by Warren.
Namely,

And reading this (although it was posted in August), it seems that caching happens along a particular line of communication between nodes, rather than a network-wide caching. This would seem to indicate that these fears may be unfounded, as users would be in many different directions on the node pathway, while each node of a botnet will be requesting data from the same nodes. Hopefully this would mean that a) ‘wide’ caching only happens when a botnet is repeatedly requesting the same chunks, and b) unusually ‘wide’ caching would only affect the botnet itself, and other users requesting from that node.

If this approach makes botnets unprofitable, they won’t take place, while individual users accessing my content will be lighting up many different node pathways, and so many different caches would have to be activated for loss of income to occur in a significant way (hopefully). Stated differently, it seems to me that the content would have to be enormously popular, to cause ‘cache income loss’, if I have understood @dirvine correctly.

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The issue here is that copyright is not compatible with privacy and freedom. You can’t have copyright unless you have someone monitoring who holds copyright and who doesn’t. Who has the right to have the movie and who doesn’t? The network doesn’t know, the network CAN’T know as that would infringe upon privacy and break the security of the network.

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Blindsite2K you’re wrong about that. To have a copyright is one thing, to monitor and enforce is another.
There are even libertarian economics who support the concept of IPR. I don’t have a final position on the issue, but I tend to lean toward the idea that IPR (including copyright) exist, but that they should be contract-based. Meaning, if you haven’t signed a contract, you don’t have to respect them.
So if you login to a site which says “This is a contract that says you can’t make copies of my shit”, and if you agree, you are then bound by the agreement.

That’s the monitoring and enforcement part. Maybe I don’t need this feature from the network? I just need to know if I have the right and if you wronged me.
Maybe I can find out that you (whoever you are) are posting my shit on the Web and (assuming you agreed to the contract I mentioned above) now I can pay someone to find you and take your property to compensate me for losses my streaming video site suffered because of you.
How they do it (hacking, big data, social engineering) is none of my concern. The question is would I have the right to do this and the answer (according to the contact approach) would be a resounding Yes.

You obviously built your position and are completely sure you’re right.
If your position is consistent, then you can tell us if we have the right to obtain and distribute your healthcare data.

You are obviously confusing the difference between the difference between something that is private and something that is copyrighted.

Something that is private has to do with maintaining a trust with someone. If I share my healthcare information with a health care practitioner I don’t care how many copies they make so long as the keep the information private and confidiential and only share it with those who I say they can share it with, i.e. respect my consent and maintain that bond of trust. However copyright is about maintaining an exclusive number of copies of the product, of making an abundant product scarce, somewhat like they do with diamonds. There are TONS of diamonds on the planet but the big diamond companies have basically cornered the market on all the mines, metered out the sales and jacked up the prices to ridiculous heights. Same thing with copyright. You’re not trying to keep anything secret, you’re just trying to make sure no one figures out your diamonds are actually worth pennies instead of thousands of dollars. So you write up a contract and tell people not to give out free diamonds out the back door of the mine even tho you’re swimming in the things and you’ve got them by the truckload.

Let me get this straight: You write up a contract with someone you don’t know and don’t trust. Then when they don’t believe the same as you and break the contract you “somehow” magically find out they are posting your shit and “somehow” magically find out they are the ones exclusively posting your shit and “somehow” can afford to pay someone to find them and rob them. You also assume that your mark has enough property value to be worth all this trouble in the first place. You could be totally broke after all of this as the guy who is posting your media has absolutely no money! But I think the most ludicrous part of all this is why would you contract with someone you don’t trust and don’t know in the first place? And why would you think that if you did contract with such an unknown that it would be respected? “Do you accept the terms and conditions of this software.” Do you actually believe in your heart that MEANS anything to anyone? Do you actually believe anyone READS the terms and conditions? Those aren’t contracts. A contract is a piece of paper you can sit down with and cross out terms you don’t like. A contract is something you can negotiate. A contract is NOT a yes or no statement. One of the essential elements of a contract is one’s ability to negitiate said contract and agree or reject EACH term just like you would in any other kind of contract law. That’s why i find electronic “contracts” to be a complete joke.

But let’s assume you got the contract. Contracts could be linked to a reputation system. So assuming you could prove a user actually broke a contract with you there’s no need to send hoods after him. All you need to do is mark down his reputation. If his reputation falls enough others will refuse to contract with him. Then he’s in a real problem because he won’t be able to form various relationships.

So yeah in a way we’re both talking about trust, or honor, just in different ways. I really don’t care about breaking trust with Big Media because I really don’t empathize with someone who wants to create artificial scarcity nor do I need their approval in any way. However I do need to maintain a relationship of trust with my doctor and assorted healthcare practitioners.

@janitor & @blindsite2k Before filling this thread with a long discussion about something different from the OP, please reply on linked topic or take it to PM.

I am also an open source developer. The problem I have with this model of payment for GETs is that we’re valuing development work by the bandwidth it uses. That’s ludicrous. Spending 3 years to make a game and get paid based on the file size of its assets will seem like a waste when you could have just uploaded a pirated copy of a movie… or instead spent all your time building apps that are high bandwidth, like publishing/sharing/pirating sites and video chat apps.

On top of this, the source of all this money comes as a tax on everyone holding safecoin and everyone paying PUT fees.

It’s noble to attempt to pay content creators like OSS devs (or artists, journalists, etc) but none of these people should be paid based on the bandwidth their creative output produces. These rules will not favor this group of people, it will favor those who game the rules, at the expense of everyone else.

This is such a complex goal, paying for intellectual property. It’s been a problem society has tried to fix since ever concepts like copyright and patents have existed. I think an attempt to solve it as an afterthought on an otherwise well-designed network will fail wildly.

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If you look at his comment before yours you will see that discussion had already been split off to a new topic in off-topic category.

I can’t see that, maybe because I’m on mobile. Lose several features this way so that’s useful to know.

Anyway @janitor, thanks for doing that. :smile:

@blindsite2k when you are about to post a long response, that would be a good moment to consider whether it adds value to the topic or could be better redirected to a linked topic.

Right, but I don’t support paying anyone with SAFE aside from people that make tools to make the network better…

Pajama Trolls ought not be paid the same as community builders, Medical Researchers ought not be paid the same as pornographers. Pirates ought not be paid the same as artists. A 9 page whitepaper might change the world while a 350 page paper might be totally useless. If the network cannot differentiate, then the network may not be the best tool for paying them. And that is where I am at – They can build their own community currencies for people to invest in and they can earn payments that much more reflect the value of their contributions than you could by blanket handing out money per megabyte…

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And I’m correcting you both here :wink:

  • 10% MaidSafeCoins from Crowdsale
  • 5% Previous investors upon request from people with equity in MaidSafe
  • 5% Core development moving forward
  • 80% goes for “farming” (MaidSafe equivalent of Mining)
  • out of that, 10% of the farming goes to third party “builders”.

My source is this document that I just found, here

You are quoting the “pools” where the coins come from. And I believe that now it is 70% for farmers of the total coin, but could be less with pay the creator proposal and the devs is its own 10%

@Ghaunt is quoting the RFC and David’s posts that say that for a GET the farmer is paid if the farming coin is available (“lottery”) AND dev is paid if dev coin is available. The farmer has exactly the same chance of being rewarded whether dev is associated with the GET or not.

Related but different analysis

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I very much agree with your analysis.

Another worry of mine with this scheme is that it seems to close the door to deterministic caching:

[quote=“dirvine, post:2, topic:2798”]
It requires a different cache mechanism called deterministic cache. So for changing data (say twitter feed) the nodes holding the data can push out in a deterministic way cache copies. So they all copy 1 hop and if that’s not enough it goes one more and so on. The original holders know the hop count of this cache and when an update happens they can push the update Xhops knowing it will update all cached copies.

Then the subscriber/broadcast mechanism can broadcast the message out these hops and the outer edges can send the message to subscribers. The deterministic cache holders can tell they are sending to too many subscribers so they request a cache size increase, the original holders then push this 1 hop further (halving the subscribers to be sent by each node) and so on.[/quote]

Under deterministic caching the GET income would completely stop the moment caching kicks in. So deterministic caching and reward-the-uploader seem to be incompatible.

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