m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Bruce Baugh at Tor.com has a couple of interviews about ransoming: holding your work hostage until the audience ponies up sufficient donations, as seen on PBS. The post itself is about role-playing games, but the application to writing and other art is obvious.

[… C]opyright is hard to enforce in a lot of situations, and seems likely to get harder to enforce without huge resources to devote to the hunt, or even with them. After looking at some often-proposed ways of making that enforcement work and explaining why they disbelieve in them, the authors suggest instead a sort of fund-and-release system. The creator makes a public announcement of a project and its cost, and the potential audience can donate their money. If the creator gets enough money, they do the work and then release it to the world at large.

Six years later, along came Fundable, which makes it easy for creators to set up a variety of funding requests and expect their dough, and also makes it easy for the public to contribute money in a variety of ways and expect their money to be safely handled along the way. It’s a specialized escrow service, basically, and it quickly earned a reputation for great reliability, prompt attention to customers of both kinds, and just plain goodness in operation.