David Revoy (who created the (awesome) Pepper and Carrot cartoon, which is both freely licensed and the source is released) was recently interviewed on the Libre Lounge podcast (and another one in French). In the Libre Lounge episode they covered this, he essentially uses the Patreon model and when big publishers publish his work they do it under the same Creative Commons license everyone else can and in addition they fund his work using Patreon too, even though they are not obligated to do so. The episode is quite interesting in several ways.

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article771/podcasts-interviews https://librelounge.org/episodes/36-david-revoy-on-pepper--c...

You bring up an important and oft-discussed question. We're starting to see creators who make a living largely or entirely from voluntary donations.

E.g. Abbadon author of the incredible "Kill Six Billion Demons" https://killsixbilliondemons.com/about/

One of the things I wish Etsy had is a leaderboard of users (sellers) who have become financially independent through them.

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FWIW I'm one of the people that think that, as automation advances, we should see a massive decrease in cost-of-living and a corresponding increase in free time.

If that happens, we could see people becoming couch potatos or creators. I was going to say something about hedonists, but creating things is inherently pleasurable. I knew a guy who built furniture in his hope shop until the day he died. He loved it. He would give the pieces away. Beautiful scrollwork in wood.

Personally, I believe that's the long term solution: "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."

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In the short term, it's the old story: If you must be an artist either be very rich or get comfortable being very poor. You might find a patron.

The new thing on the block is, of course, crowdsourcing a distributed patron. And some people are doing that. "Ten thousand fans"

> how does the person who creates a Free Cultural Work pay their bills while doing it?

A lot of my poetry is released under the CC-BY licence[1]. I pay my bills by doing other work - as does almost every other person who writes and publishes poetry. There hasn't been a decent living wage from poetry, available to the majority, since Homer (and he/they would probably argue they weren't paid enough for their effort).

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

this needs to honestly be discussed more. Even though the article is more about discussion restrictions on the concept, the whole point of non-free culture should be to ensure the artist can realize monetary gains from his work in order to reward the time spent. Also to enable the artist to have some control over the distribution and direction of his work, as well as incentivize new and original work.

CC doesn't do anything for the artist.

it's great for distributors, who can aggregate and monetize free content, and remixers, who have a base of ready-made content to use as a basis for their own works. And of course the audience. But i don't really see the point of it as an artist.

Saying that "providing works that other people are free to build on doesn't do anything for the artist" is rather short-sighted.

Imagine someone living on a river saying, "Keeping the river water clean doesn't do anything for me!" OK, maybe your pollution doesn't affect you, it only affects people downstream of you. But if the people upstream pollute the river, you'll wish they hadn't.

It's also untrue that artists are distinct from remixers. Is "West Side Story" just a remix of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"? I think often of The Time John Fogerty Was Sued for Ripping Off John Fogerty: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-... Fogerty was just trying to write songs, but unsurprisingly his new songs sounded similar to his old songs, which had ended up under someone else's control. Was he "remixing" himself? Making art that is entirely new and does not relate to or reflect on any past art is almost impossible.

As Lessig put it:

- Creativity always builds on the past

- The past tries to control the creativity that builds upon it

- Free societies enable creativity by limiting this power of the past

- Ours is less and less a free society

> Free societies enable creativity by limiting this power of the past

How does the "limiting" part of this work?

Two obvious examples of limits on copyright are (1) copyright terms not lasting forever, copyrighted works should eventually enter the public domain, and (2) some uses of copyrighted work not requiring permission from the copyright holder, "fair use".

It has been said (in another cartoon) that the greatest threat to artists isn't piracy, its obscurity:

https://mimiandeunice.com/2010/11/17/obscurity/

Oddly they go together hand in hand.