This might sound cynical, but that's how people are . There was a documentary that came out last year called I Dream of Wires about analog modular synthesizers, which are going through a renaissance right now thanks to low-cost short-run manufacturing and a much wider audience for electronic music than existed during the previous modular heyday of the 1970s. So they raised lots of money on Kickstarter, and one of the rewards for backers was exclusive access to a 4 hour Blu-Ray copy, with tons of additional footage that would be cut out of the theatrical version, but which you would certainly want to watch if this was your particular nerd obsession. Anyway, the film got made OK, but (as is very typical) the producers vastly overestimated likely interest in the film and discovered the hard way that it was too niche of a subject to appeal to regular documentary distributors. Having gone a bit over budget and spent some personal money to get it finished, they naturally wanted to break even, so after what they thought was a decent interval, they started selling the extended 4-hour Blu-ray edition to the general public on their website.

Bad idea. The people who had bought that thinking they were getting something exclusive were furious, and stalked the filmmakers across every electronic music forum where they popped their heads up, calling them fraudsters and thieves. They weren't any worse, off, as such; they had got their Blu-Rays (although I think they had to wait a long time for them, as with many Kickstarter campaigns that fall way behind schedule), and they included all the promised content delivered to a professional standard. But they thought they had bought a limited edition, and threatened the makers with lawsuits - the result being that the DVD release got pushed way back and the extended 'ahrdcore edition' has had the price jacked up to $199 (which almost nobody will ever spend) in line with the donation requirement for the original reward.

I have to say, prove it. My theory is that most people don't care about DRM the same way you do, and that more people like owning something than want to make it widely accessible, based on the abundant evidence already available about their willingness to buy exclusive rewards. What do you base your assertion about the potential number of backers upon?

This sounds sick. I don't care for exclusivity, I care for art.

That's nice of you, but it's a fact that we live in a consumer society and one of the most common sales tools is to exploit the law of supply and demand by creating artificial scarcity - even by limiting the numbers of Kickstarter rewards designed to get people to donate before someone else. You can effectively solicit a higher donation level by restricting the availability of the perk, and I find it hard to blame people for exploiting a business strategy that is known to work.

In all seriousness, how much do you care for art? What $ amount would you be prepared to donate or put at risk by investing? I'm not asking this to win an argument, I'm genuinely curious about the economic value you attach to your ideological position. Would you be influenced by some combination, eg for $x you become a patron of the DRM-free copy but you also get a special T-shirt or other item that's not available to others, and if so to what degree?

And actually such kind of attitude in the project would make it feel repealing for me.

You've gotta sell what people want to buy. If you say you're going to be making the top-of-the-line quality product available as widely as possible later, then many people will reasonably ask why they should bother giving you money now. I don't think that people in the aggregate are as generous as you may be as an individual. Now, if you're quite wealthy and in a position make very generous donations that could balance out beautifully, but the basic business model of Kickstarter and similar sites is about raising lots of small donations from a crowd rather than targeting a smallish number of more substantial donors.

That's all besides the fact that Youtube doesn't have DRM.

Yeah but YouTube video quality is shit. Of course it's good by historical standards but then TVs used to be much less capable than today. Many people do not find the quality satisfactory for leisure viewing. If you watch the same video on YouTube and Vimeo (eg many people upload camera tests to both websites) you can see a substantail difference on Vimeo, and mp4 quality would be better again. I don't like watching YouTube on a television, in general. Admittedly this is more of a short-term problem, and it will all be 'good enough' soon enough, just as Netflix streaming was mediocre in quality for the first year or two but now looks fine most of the time (at least on a HDTV).

If Alice will pay $10 for a streaming copy (with DRM), Bob will pay $30 for a DRM-free copy, but Carol will pay $50 for an exclusive DRM-free copy, the rational approach is to sell to Alice and Carol for a total of $60. Bob says that other people would be willing to buy the DRM-free copy later, but from the producer's standpoint the only thing that matters is who's willing to pay money up front because a) there are a lot of costs that have to be paid up front* and b) backend revenue is uncertain.

* Of course you can defray those up-front costs by asking people to work for free or deferred pay, which has been a very popular trend over the last decade. But it's awful to work that way and none of the projects I've ever done that for ever turned a profit.

Unfortunately Kickstarter doesn't provide a way to play the two off against each other, eg setting up 2 projects for DRM advocates vs owners and going with whichever one outraises the others.

Take a look at fiasco with Veronica Mars crowdfunded film which was released with DRM.

I did. I think it was a storm in a teacup, because the intersection between fans of a TV show and people who care passionately about DRM is just not that big. The primary issue seemed to be that people did not care for getting their digital download through Flixster and would rather have redeemed through iTunes or Amazon. As best I can see from the project page, ~22k people were willing to pay a $10 premium over the next reward to get a digital download in addition to a T-shirt, but not another $15 to get a DVD. About 10% of the comments post-release consisted of grumbling about the Flixster download (primarily that it was slow and/or buggy and unreliable; I'm not sure what percentage of them cared about the underlying principle), so it looks like maybe 2500 people who spent about $25,000 were pissed off, or ~4% of the backers contributing 0.5% of the budget.

The basic problem for producers is this: you can estimate the number of people interested in purchasing a restricted version of the film by looking at other projects which offer that and seeing how many of those reward offerings actually sold. I believe you that there are people sitting on the sidelines instead of donating/purchasing because they care about a DRM-free release, but how do I quantify what that demographic is worth?

If I see a project that's interesting to me, I consider supporting it on condition that it doesn't plan to use such unethical garbage as DRM in result. How much would I invest in it? That depends on the project. I don't do it out of having unlimited funds. Not at all - my funds are pretty limited. I do it because I care for those projects and without my support they are less likely to be created.

OK, but your lack of support has to be set against the number of people who are willing to pay for some exclusive right. In the case of Kung Fury that was about $90,000 - ~6000 people were willing to pay $20 for a 1080p download with exclusive content, vs $5 for the DRM-hobbled streaming version you paid for. So what I'm asking is: if you see a film you think you would like, what extra amount are you willing to pay to ensure it is made available DRM-free? It doesn't matter if you'd make a big donation of $1000 once a year to advance the cause, or you'd rather donate and extra $20 to 50 different projects, or even just 5.

But right now I have no idea how much you and other people who care about DRM are holding back. I looked at several different Kickstarter projects that offer DRM-free downloads (including Game Loading - Rise of the Indies, which raised over $60k AUD) doing a similar analysis (trying to ID how much people were willing to contribute for the digital download only, rather than the next reward with additional swag) and the numbers seem to be in the low thousands. Even if I scale budgets the numbers are a good bit lower, eg about $45,000 in DRM-free download purchases if I imagine that other projects had brought in the same overall revenue as Kung Fury and allocate the appropriate amount to download rewards.

This suggests that there's only half as much money on offer up front for DRM-free downloads as for exclusive offerings, and so that it's more rational to use a market segmentation strategy than to offer the same thing at the same price to everyone. From a producer standpoint, cash is the only thing that people are willing to accept as payment for work, and real cash now is much more persuasive than hypothetical cash later.

I mean, maybe you and other anti-DRM people should set up a fund and disburse grants or something, but only to people who commit to DRM-free movie and game releasing. That's how other people promote their causes. Money talks, as they say.

IMHO such approach reduces the number of potential backers instead of increasing it. Clear cut DRM-free release on the other hand attracts more supporters.

All campaigns I participated in clearly saw DRM-free release as helpful for attracting more backers (those who reject DRM).