Unlike big Hollywood producers, we rely directly on our fans to stay alive. And we like it that way.

Remember Firefly? How about Veronica Mars? Or Jericho? Or Farscape? We sure do. We remember trying to save them. But the tens of thousands of us who cared weren't enough to move the Nielsen ratings. Or to sway advertiser's or executive's hearts. The bottom line was that they didn't understand the shows and they didn't understand us. (You wouldn't believe the crap we've heard when pitching to the networks in L.A.) So why try to make a show in a system that's designed to kill good shows?

Another thing. Studios and networks eat up a lot of money, usually out of the pockets of the actual creative artists. Plus, they get so paranoid about piracy that they treat their biggest fans like criminals. Ever had your HDMI system refuse to play a movie that you bought, fair and square, all because of some malicious code in the cable that decided to block the signal? Or maybe you're one of the people who bought 1984 for the Kindle, only to wake up one morning to discover that Amazon.com had taken it back. These aren't accidents. It's a move by the people who control distribution to continue to control distribution, and furthermore, to train you to be happy licensing your media, rather than owning it.

We think that's ridiculous. DRM treats the people who play by the rules like they're pirates, while the pirates get to use their media as they wish. Meanwhile, copyright attorneys scour the web for potential file sharers and try to sue them into oblivion. In one famous case, they accused a fax machine of pirating music.

We want to do things differently. Here's how:

• Release our shows online, for free.
• No DRM or copy-protection in our works, period.
• Every show we release is licensed under a Creative Commons NC-SA-BY license, to empower you to share it with your friends, remix it, download it, whatever, as long as you're not making a commercial profit from our work. (That's to keep Hollywood out of our henhouse.)
• We'll make it easy to create commercial derivative works, too.
• Our DVDs are region-free and free of copy-protection.

Which gets to how you can support us:

• Share our work! Our biggest enemy is obscurity. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, you name it, wherever you like to go for information, spread the word.
• Become a financial contributor, either one-time or ongoing.
• Share our thermometer widget, embed it on your website, and join us as we work toward our financial target for next season.
• Buy our DVDs. And because we're self-distributing, you know that your dollars actually count for something.
• Remix our shows. Make cool stuff. Write stories, or music, or new movies. Contribute to culture. (And link back to us.)
• Volunteer to screen at your local convention. We can't travel everywhere, but our fans are already there. We'll help you through every step of the process.
• Help us create subtitles in your language.
• Come up with cool new ideas and share them with us!

Curious to learn more about our business model? Check out the video of this in-depth presentation we gave recently at a Seattle Film Office event: [link].