Summary

The PaySwarm Project is creating a standard mechanism for purchasing and re-selling digital goods online.

Introduction

Electronic commerce sales for the 2008 fiscal year in the USA was roughly $204 billion dollars. The vast majority of these sales were performed using non-interoperable shopping cart software, credit card processing software and many layers of unnecessary, proprietary protocols for exchanging information related to payments and transaction processing that simultaneously ignore the fundamental architecture of the Web.

The rise of the sale of digital goods online and the lack of a standard protocol for listing and selling digital goods further demonstrates a standards need that is not currently being met. The Web has changed the way distribution of digitizable goods occurs. For example, instead of receiving photographs from a photographer, photo proofs are often now uploaded to a website. Physical prints are often secondary and are purchased through a variety of photo printing services. Music, books and video are among the media that are transitioning to a variety of digital distribution models. The common thread among the sale of all of these digital goods is the transaction mechanism that is currently used, or rather, the lack of a web standard for transacting digital goods online. Ideally, our web browsers could handle the acquisition of digital goods just as they handle the acquisition of digital files from remote websites.

This unmet need has resulted in a variety of negative market effects, most notably with regard to the distribution of digital music. The wide-spread failure of Digital Rights Management and the inability for user agents to provide legal downloads as a first class citizen have created an environment that places corporation and customer against one another when they could be working together to legally distribute digital content.

This document outlines a set of scenarios and use cases that should be addressed by standardized technologies for transacting digital goods online. This document should be used to influence the design direction for the PaySwarm APIs, any related browser technology and the overall environment for the transaction of digital goods in exchange for monetary compensation on the World Wide Web.

Prevailing digital content publishing practices for the past decade should be taken into account when influencing the design direction of the set of standards that will be published as a part of this work activity. Special attention should be given to defining very clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to ensure interoperability.

Contributing

This is a very experimental project and has no status as a standards-track endeavor at this time. While it is very early in the development of this system, all feedback is welcome.

Browsable version-control record of all changes: Github change record: http://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm/tree/ Raw Git interface: git clone git://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm.git