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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 an

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.

zozbot234 6y ago
> 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.
- gkop 6y ago
  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.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  You mean this one? The one that no browser actually does anything with? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 "The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use." Of course, I guess "this is actually just a concept now but we promise it will be meaningful in the future" is actually something HTTP 402 has in common with Project Xanadu. (zing!)
kmeisthax 6y ago
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.
- wmf 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago
slightwinder 6y ago
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.

zozbot234 6y ago

> 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.

gkop 6y ago
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.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
You mean this one? The one that no browser actually does anything with? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 "The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use." Of course, I guess "this is actually just a concept now but we promise it will be meaningful in the future" is actually something HTTP 402 has in common with Project Xanadu. (zing!)

kmeisthax 6y ago

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.

wmf 6y ago
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.
- 6y ago

slightwinder 6y ago

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.