For those of you who know what Kickstarter is you’ll probably agree that it is a wonderful service. For those that don’t know, Kickstarter is a service that lets anyone post their idea for a project, invention, charity, whatever on the page and then people can donate money to see the project completed, usually with prizes for donating.

Kickstarter has been great for independent filmmakers as it allows common people to overcome the biggest obstacle in making films, money. This has lead to numerous mini-series on youtube and even a few feature length productions.

Recently Zach Braff posted to Kickstarter that he wan’t money to make another film which will probably be similar to Garden State. There is controversy however because Zach Braff has money. The Argument is that people would have to pay to get the film produced and then pay more to see it. Sound’s ridiculous right?

This got me thinking about ownership to the films creative rights should it get made. Normally producers provide the money for films to get made and they are then able to make a profit off of the film because copyright law grants them a certain percentage of the ticket sales depending on how much money they provided for the film. On Kickstarter though people are providing the same function a producer would except that unlike the producer they don’t get paid from the ticket sales and probably wouldn’t get credited in the film. So even though Kickstarter has fulfilled the producer role the “Producers” aren’t getting the reward they should from performing their function in the production of the film.