Those are very fair points and have been an issue for creators long before digital content. It really does not matter how sealed of an environment is, because in the end people can extract the information and share it else where. It still is an unsolved problem.

But ZapGates add a very interesting thing to the mix: signatures. Because of the way the protocol is built every post is signed by the creator and copy cats are easy to spot as long as the public key of the original creator is known. The event also can not be republished without the pay gate in, because the protected url is part of the signed data. As is the payment target.

This does not protect against people willingly consuming stolen content, but at least makes the integrity and „realness“ of a post verifiable

Good point and thank you for your feedback! We looked at NIP94 when we started this and it uses a „url“ tag. Probably would be a good idea to agree on a single standard for url/uri…

We are building a PoC for interoperable paygates on nostr. Content that is only revealed to public keys that zapped a certain event.

We call it ZapGate (https://ZapGate.link)