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