A People's Marketplace
LBRY is the first digital marketplace to be controlled by the market's participants rather than a corporation or other 3rd-party. It is the most open, fair, and efficient marketplace for digital goods ever created, with an incentive design encouraging it to become the most complete.
At the highest level, LBRY does something extraordinarily simple. LBRY creates an association between a unique name and a piece of digital content, such as a movie, book, or game. This is similar to the domain name system that you are most likely using to access this very post.
However, LBRY does this not through a proprietary service or network, but as a protocol, or a method of doing things, much like HTTP, DNS and other specifications that make up the internet itself. Just as many different domains owned by many different companies all speak a shared language, so too can any person or company speak LBRY. No special access or permission is needed.
LBRY differs from the status quo in three big ways:
- Coupled payment and access. If desired, the person who publishes to lbry://rhapsody-film#e1029aaa08bef8e9225efcbfb94a895e9bbdc8ea can charge a fee to users that view the content.
- Decentralized and distributed. Content published to LBRY is not specific to one computer or network, making LBRY robust to failure and disruption.
- Community controlled. No party other than the publisher (including us) can unilaterally remove or block content on the LBRY network.2
While creating a protocol that we ourselves cannot control sounds chaotic, it is actually about establishing trust. Every other publishing system requires trusting an intermediary that can unilaterally change the rules on you. What happens when you build your business on YouTube or Amazon and they change fees? Or Apple drops your content because the Premier of China thought your comedy went too far?
Only LBRY consists of a known, promised set of rules that no one can unilaterally change. LBRY provides this by doing something unique: leaving the users in control rather than demanding that control for itself.
2If it worries you that LBRY facilitates infringing or unsavory content, this is addressed in Combatting the Ugly.