When I wrote last week about the rising trend of Hollywood figures using Kickstarter to solicit backing for projects that they might or might not have been able to finance through the normal studio system, I got back two main objections to the idea of giving Kickstarter backers equity in the projects they invest in. First, there was the idea that Kickstarter is effectively a means of garnering charitable support, the cause being to liberate artists from the crippling influence of profit-making system. Second, there was the objection that expectations of equity would put pressure on filmmakers to generate profits, leading them to make more commercial decisions than they might have otherwise, and eliminating the advantage of working outside the studio advantage in the first place.

I’m not exceptionally sympathetic to the idea that Kickstarter is or should be a charitable enterprise for any number of reasons. First, there’s the idea, which I think animates a lot of the anti-Kickstarter sentiment, and which is not entirely fair to people working in Hollywood, that there’s something distasteful about giving large amounts of money to people who already make a great deal more than many of the rest of us. More pointedly, I actually think it’s worth interrogating the idea that liberating artists from the studio system is an inherently great idea, much less one worthy of major charitable giving.

There are absolutely movies that couldn’t have been made by traditional studios, and there should be more venues that support funding movies that are about people of color, that are about poor people, that are about political subjects that aren’t going to be hot sellers but that also might not be popular enough to attract support from a big non-profit outlet like PBS. At its meritocratic best, Kickstarter can be a place where projects like those get discovered by people who will love them, and get the funding and support that other outlets are too blinkered to survive. But that isn’t actually particularly what we’re talking about here. We’re addressing the argument that Kickstarter can give artists who have long records of working in commercial film and television and making projects with studio backing the chance to buy their way out of the system. In the case of the Veronica Mars movie, that’s not really what’s going on. The movie, as I understand it, will still be made in collaboration with Warner Brothers, which is handling distribution of things like rewards. In the case of Zach Braff’s project, his Kickstarter is explicitly set up so he can exit a commercial system that would have provided him with funding, but under conditions he didn’t want to accept.

With that clear, it’s worth remembering what working in the system provides. It means excellent facilities and equipment. It means getting hooked up with distribution. It means the ability to reach out to talent more easily than might have been possible otherwise. While there are absolutely edits from networks and studios that end up being bad for film and television, and that are cowardly, conversations between executives and creators are not inherently some sort of poisonous thing, and genius—or even mere inspiration—is not inherently best off when it’s left to flourish unsupervised. This is a common misnomer that people on the outside of creative professions seem to have, but almost everyone I know who writes, or makes art, appreciates second opinions, and editing, and advice on what will find an audience and what won’t. 30 Rock was initially going to be a show about cable news. Lena Dunham works with Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner for a reason. We can argue about the results, but one thing that working with NBC or HBO gets you is access to Lorne Michaels or Judd Apatow, particularly for artists who are leveling up. I would be much more interested in bending the curve on what studios are willing to take on than in exiting the system entirely, whether a Kickstarter demonstrates a strong core audience for a given creator or project, whether it becomes matching funds, or whether Kickstarted funds are what let an artist buy access to a studio’s resources.
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In a speech that steered clear of policy proscriptions, but that urged a need for creative thinking about copyright and content distribution, former President Bill Clinton on Friday called for further discussion “about the need to give people an appropriate return on their ideas and development of them, and presentation of it, in film and music and in other areas, and the need to give it as quickly as possible to the world.”

Clinton’s speech came at the Creativity Conference, a half-day meeting hosted by the Motion Picture Association of America, Microsoft, and Time Magazine, where participants ranging from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to HBO CEO Richard Plepler discussed issues in the creative economy ranging from federal research and development investment to copyright. While there was a clear consensus on the first issue, with even Cantor, who has focused on spending cuts, suggesting that the government had a valuable role to play in research and development, some participants spoke frankly, and even harshly, on the subject of copyright.

“So I think a very good business plan [is] here, use somebody else’s content for free, deliver it, don’t pay them anything, and build a $500 billion silicon valley company, and then have cool slogans like ‘We just want to help the world,’” said Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of the Weinstein Company, appearing to refer to YouTube and its parent company Google. “They’re stealing. That’s what they’re doing. My artists, they can’t be artists if they’re hungry. The starving artist, trust me, that’s a myth. When you’re starving you’re starving. It’s hard to be creative in that situation.”

Clinton, by contrast, sought to establish a different framework in his remarks, suggesting that the conflict in creating copyright policy was not between who should be allowed to profit from the creation of individual work, from music to pharmaceutical development, but between balancing the interests of content finding a wide audience and making it sustainable to develop. “We have to keep struggling to find the right balance between creativity, broadly and quickly shared, and as widely understood as possible, and making it reasonably profitable for people to be creatives,” Clinton argued. As one example, he praised Saint Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, which does not accept fees for services, but encourages patients whose families can pay to make ongoing donations to the institution, and which voluntarily makes public significant amounts of its data to aid in drug development.
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The news yesterday that Warner Brothers had given Rob Thomas, the television writer who created Veronica Mars (he’s also an extremely strong young adult novelist whose work is well worth a look), permission to crowdfund a movie continuation of the show, was met with some disgruntlement that viewers were being asked to be the investors in a corporate product from which they’d recognize no profits, and, at the point of this writing $2.761 million in donations, more than enough to get the movie made. Willa Paskin is obviously correct that consumers’ ticket dollars already fund the production of movies. But in between her argument and the view of critics of the project lies an important point: if consumers are going to get asked like investors by mainstream media companies, they should think about what they want out of the bargain other than the simple creation fo the product.

The idea that investors deserve something more than the existence of whatever product or movie or show they’re funded is embedded in Kickstarter’s rewards system. If you give at different levels, you might get a t-shirt, tickets to a premiere party, or even an opportunity to name a character or appear in a film or game. Those rewards tend to be set by the people who are proposing the project, based on what they think they can manageably offer (though a considerable portion of crowd-funded projects ship their core products late, and some developers are running into problems when demand or unexpected costs for rewards means higher burdens for delivery than they expected). Where consumer choice enters into the process is the selection of the reward level, rather than the offerings themselves.

One thing that’s striking about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter is that you have to give at least $35, more than four times the cost of the average American movie ticket in 2012, to get a digital download of the movie. You have to give $750 to get a ticket to the premiere of the film in Los Angeles. If the Kickstarter was really inverting the process by which ticket sales fund the production of movies, going from taking the profits from one project and plowing them into the creation of another, to letting people put that ticket money up in advance, then the campaign would have to get tickets or downloads to all of its donors. It would be a method that would be fair to fans, who after all, want to see the thing they’re funding, and it might make a lot of sense for both the studios and for third-party retailers like Fandango. Nothing sells tickets like advance buzz, and getting people to commit to see the movie in advance is probably a good way to get them to bring their friends along as well. And while tickets and downloads require initial coordination with Fandango or iTunes, they’re less costly and work-intensive than say, printing and mailing t-shirts.

That’s a small example of the sorts of material things that fans could and should express that they want out of projects like this. But there are a lot of other ways to think about these kinds of investment opportunities. I might have been more excited, for example, to invest in buying back the rights to create new work in the Veronica Mars universe for Rob Thomas, if Warner Brothers could have been persuaded to sell it. I’d love to see a block of fan investors who prioritize projects that commit to work with union crews and pay actors union wages.

And I’ve written about this before, but I’d frankly love to see fans move beyond investing in single projects. Given all the discussion we have about the whiteness of movies and television, and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have written, the lack of black investors who are willing and able to lose money financing projects, I’d be excited to see a crowd-funded film investment fund that only backs projects by creators of color or featuring non-white actors, perhaps that’s structured as a non-profit*. Ditto for an investment fund that could back projects by women. There’s nothing wrong with passionate attachment to single franchises, or single creators, but those aren’t the only ways that fans think about popular culture. And limiting our demonstrations of investment power to single artists or single projects ultimately limits our reach, and our ability to affect the culture. I don’t think fans are ever going to put together Megan Ellison money, for example. But I think ordinary viewers, over time, and perhaps through subscription, could put together enough to fund a series of projects that would be good enough to attract notice at places like Sundance and SXSW.

All of these approaches mean thinking through an awful lot of logistics and organizational questions. But those are all much less difficult to do than that getting fans to think of themselves not as supplicants but as an economic force. It’s easy to feel disempowered in the face of show cancellations and fired showrunners and huge delays in movie adaptations. But at a moment of extraordinary chaos in the television industry, and of new and emerging distribution models in both movies and television, this is the perfect moment for viewers with money to spend to assert ourselves, and not just to buy a speaking part in a Veronica Mars movie.

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