Clickshare is one answer to paying for content (Score 3)

People pay for content every day -- in aggregated form. They buy CD-ROMs, they buy newspapers and magazines, they purchase periodicals and books. Those physical forms are technical capable of being delivered on the Internet today, and in far more customized manifestations than their physical bretheren.

What is lacking is a reliable transaction platform which permits billing for the use of these items on a disaggregated basis across multiple websites.

Napster could work with a mechanism exists for a consumer to click on an MP3 music file at any participating website, and pay for that one song, collecting a set of songs onto a hard-drive and then burning a CD -- the contents of which may consist of songs with royalties owed to 13 or 15 different composers or record labels. Or a consolidating website -- an "infomediary" may wish to bundle a digital product which consists of content resources culled from a dozen other websites.

All that is required is a mechanism for that infomediary website to reliably apportion out the bundled cost of such a product to the underlying producers.

Clickshare's transaction platform for privacy-protected digital-content purchasing envisions this solution. A consumer can have one account at a most-trusted infomediary and purchase content from multiple related websites, paying just one aggregated bill and without having to register over, and over again.

"Micropayments" are a misnomer. Some consumers may want to pay per song. Others may want a subscription or to purchase a collection. The point is to enable all such behaviors, while acknowledging that in the background, there must be a logging mechanism which will sort out the discrete royalty payments to all the constuent content providers.