I propose a system, dubbed AHERO (because the world needs AHERO)
In the AHERO network, record companies, movie studios, TV networks etc, place their digital content for paid download.
Let’s follow a DVD movie for download and say, for the sake of argument, that the movie studio wants $10 for the movie. A person, Mr. X, pays $10 in AHERO credits and downloads this movie from the studio’s server. Once Mr. X has downloaded the movie, he makes it available for download to other AHERO users, P2P-style. Another downloader, Mr. Y, downloads the movie from Mr. X and pays Mr. X $10 in AHERO credits for the movie which Mr. X passes, automatically, back to the movie studio. Now, here’s the trick. Since Mr. X really performed a service for the movie studio by distributing the movie to an end customer by using his own bandwidth and electricity and thereby without using any of the studio’s resources, the movie studio can reasonably pay Mr. X a certain amount for performing this service. Let’s say that Mr. X is paid $1 for this distributing service.
In practice, all that happens is:Mr. Y pays $10, $9 goes directly to the content owner, and $1 goes to the person he downloads from.
Now, if Mr. X allows 9 more users to download the movie, he has earned $10 by selling his distribution service, and he can spend that money on buying another movie to distribute. As long as he uploads more than he downloads, he can download free, legal content.
Now, the amount of bytes uploaded and downloaded in total are the same, so some people will have to download more than they upload. These people simply buy AHERO credits and purchase the content as if it were a normal download store (except the network is massively distributed and hugely redundant, which means incredibly fast download times), The people who want free content simply pay with their upload bandwidth.
The content owner wins, because his content is hosted on a large-scale distributed network, so his stuff can be downloaded without him having to worry about server load etc.
The distributing user wins because he gets free and legal content.
The non-distributing user wins because the network is highly reliable and non-centered.
I say we build this thing.
(By attaching a monetary value to each block of, say, 32 bytes, distributed swarm BitTorrent-style networks would work in the same way. You’d get paid a percentage of the distribution amount equal to the percentage of the file you’ve uploaded.)
