(posted on rentry to make it mobile freindly. Read the original here)
My favorite content creator is Vincent Van Gogh...
by Ed Brubaker
I got a big response from people about the last newsletter's rant about AI and how much I hate it, so I thought I'd open this time with how sick I am of the words 'content' and 'IP.' They sound like scientific terms, like referring to a car as a "transportation device" or food as "processed nutrition." Which are both technically true, but you never see people actually calling them that like it's some cool industry jargon.
Yet somehow in the last ten years, I've seen writers and filmmakers, some comics people even, start using the phrase IP regularly and not getting mocked for it. That lack of mocking was a mistake. IP is what the studios called what you did so they could say it was their property and go get a billion dollars from a bank. Banks don't like "comic characters" but "intellectual property" sounds like a real asset.
Well, I'm not a content creator and I don't make IP. I write stories, I create characters, with Sean and Marcos I make comics and graphic novels. I also write movies and television shows. None of those things needed to be grouped together under another word. And I find it really strange to see regular people adopting slang only the douche-iest industry folk actually use. "We need more content for our platform! Content is king!" "We hear so and so are looking for more IP, you should get a meeting. IP is hot now!" "We really value content creators here at Shitty Corp!" I guess it's part of the whole backseat driving, Monday-morning-quarterbacking thing that social media has made even worse. Everyone wants to seem like an insider.
But when I hear any artform being referred to as 'content' I want to puke. Reducing it down to that makes it seem like something made in a factory, and that makes it have less value. Just like subscription sites for music trained a generation of people that records had no monetary value. (Snoop Dogg talks about this all the time now, and he's right). We're in the midst of a long cycle of big entertainment corps trying to rebuild the studio system at the expense of artists and workers, and words mean things. A great movie needs people to make it. Content can likely be made by a machine.
All this garbage, and the mega-merger driven world of Hollywood, has made me even more thankful for my career in comics, as much as the comics industry has its own problems. But at least it's analog, to large degree. You make a thing, it comes out, it's pretty simple on the basic level. Of course, I also work for one of the only publishers where you can actually own what you create, so I'm lucky there, too.
Lately I've been thinking about that a lot, too, how hard it's getting to actually own what you make. You even hear about book publishers asking for media rights on novels sometimes now, after hundreds of years of them not doing that. Even if you can keep your ownership, you're still forced to give up control to big tech in some ways. Like you sometimes can't set the prices for Kindle releases, so you end up with an online retailer undercutting your sales by selling the digital edition for half price or less. I've talked to so many writers who've had problems with digital pricing just like that, that it's made me want to stop doing digital releases at all, honestly. I want to be able to control our publishing, and dealing with these giant companies, there are times when I simply can't. The only thing I can control is the printed versions.
And I'm saying this from a position of success in my field, but I can also feel that it's becoming rarer and rarer for other artists and writers to get to that position. There are less places to go when you're starting out that won't take a big piece of your ownership away, if not all of it. It's a hell of a time to be a writer or an artist, even without the freakouts about AI (which again are valid and AI can go fuck itself to death for eternity).
Anyway, long story short, please don't call art 'IP' or 'content' if you're someone that actually makes or enjoys it. Okay. End of rant.