An employment would be one way.
Demanding things on behalf of “starving artists” otherwise sounds exactly like the “starving FLOSS maintainer” who burns out because nobody will find their work. Unfortunate but it’s on them to find a sustainable business model if they want it as an income stream. A ban on general computing will not save either the artist nor the programmer.
How so? All employment arrangements I've been involved in paid based on time that was previously worked (like, paid monthly for previous month), with the pay being for the clear, partial, progress that is shown during that time that I worked. I've never been paid, in anywhere near full, for time I will work in the future, or progress I will make. I've never seen as employer that pays, in full, for to-be-completed work. This seems extremely risky. Do you have an example?
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter where people treat creations as an investment. Patronage platforms like Patreon where people can support creators they like on a regular basis.
Maybe that's the answer. Maybe not. I don't really know. I just know copyright is insane.
> All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold.
That works for physical goods which are naturally scarce. Data is infinitely abundant. Supply is infinite. Price might as well be zero.
The value is the labor that creates the data, not the data itself. The artists, the programmers, these people are valuable. There needs to be some way they can get paid for the act of creating rather than sales of the artificially scarce product of their labor. Because that artificial scarcity was dead the second computers were invented.
Do you have an industry/example in mind where this is the case? All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold. I can't think of anything that's sold based purely on promises, without extreme risk being involved. And when this is the case, it seems there's some partial initial payment (and initial debt put on the creator of that something) to mitigate some of that risk, with complete payment after the thing is finished.