If You Don’t Pay Licensing Fees, Do You Suffer From Arrested Development?

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Our friends at Techdirt seem to believe that it is “crazy” to have a documentary film project raise copyright licensing fees through Kickstarter. But why? We think it’s a good idea to have artists — of all media — start getting used to thinking of legal issues as part of their (business) practice, and licensing images is one of them.

After all, if artists can use fund raising platforms to raise cash for booze for art openings, or for additional advertisement (as Techdirt would have it), then why not to compensate the creators of copyrightable work, even if it happens to be a mega-corporation like 20th Century Fox?