Category: Writing

I’m gonna preface all of this with I am NOT a lawyer, and copyright law, especially, is one where frequently the winner is the person in court with the most money. So below is largely my opinion…

Copyright isn’t a god given right – there’s no mention of it in the bible and humanity flourished specifically because it didn’t have IP laws of any sort for a long long time (someone had a good idea? we’d take it and build on it).

But it was really the invention of the printing press and the ability to mechanically copy materials that set up the start of what we come to know as copyright – the first true copyright laws are called the Statute of Anne (enacted in 1710) and set copyright as 14 years with a possible extension of 14 years by either the publisher who the materials were licensed to or the author.

Ostensibly the point was to ensure the copyright holder could make money for their material, for a limited time and they would be encouraged to produce new material.

Of course over time copyright has gotten longer and longer, and with some notable exceptions, authors will generally had that copyright over to a publisher so they are no longer the owners of the copyright and the publisher can get all the extended goodness of owning it. Different countries cover it in different ways, the UK mostly follows the US lead. The US lead mostly follows what Sonny (from Sonny and Cher) and the Disney corporation want (mad, isn’t it?).

The French, btw, are the most friendly to authors on this front – their droit d’auteur laws developed sort of in parallel to the UK laws prevent an author signing copyright over to anyone.

The US has a thing called Fair Use (in the UK our equivalent is called Fair Dealing), the idea being that as long as you only use a piece of the material (for example reproducing an image for review) that’s fine. There are other areas of exceptions (the UK allows you to use large amounts of material for research for non-profit – in theory how google uses it’s data, as it’s commercialised is outside of this, but we all used to find google useful so it’s been largely left alone, plus who could afford to fight them on this?).

AI companies are leaning on fair use and fair dealing for the bulk of what they do – swallowing up great gobs of copyright material and then regenerating something “new” from the result. Like chopping up every word in every book ever written and then mixing it with a user’s prompt to get a whole new set of words.

And there’s lots and lots of reasons why they might be right and they might be wrong – if the produced work doesn’t even have a faint echo of any of the material? If it was trained on out of copyright work? If the prompt was say much bigger than the generated output? And i’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other exceptions, and there’s so much money to be had on the AI front that companies will spend a fortune fighting you in court.

BUT, I think what we’ve all forgotten is what the point of copyright was in the first place – a way to give people the ability to earn a living from their creations.

On that front AI holds the keys to a much more dystopian world.

We’ve already started to see Ai’s trained on Ai output that amounts to gibberish, it still needs new inputs, but ai as it stands is likely to hollow out the middle or low ends of the creative industries. Students who would learn the basic craft of drawing might end up training on ai prompt generation and never actually learn good image composition, designers who would be expected to ply their trade on consumer advertising before they’d get a sniff of working at apple, might lose work/income because ai design software can do work that is just-good-enough. We’re in danger of an air lock in the plumbing of the creative industries.

Even without creative stuff AI tools can still be powerful (and useful) but I think governments have to recognise that they don’t want to hollow out the creative arts, and while ai fanboys can argue the bit out as to whether what they’re doing falls under copyright fair use or not, the fact remains it might be good for them, but it’s not good for creatives.

Like a big unrelenting thing. Eight days since the last update.

Let’s catch up, got a neat two pager to do for Monster Fun, with a tight deadline just before I went to Cheltenham (which meant I had to crush a bit the couple of days following to get it done for the 16th which was the deadline) full colour. Think it looks good, I’m a terrible judge of these things. Already feeling like my colouring box of tricks is way too limited.

Here’s a panel from it…

Editor liked it, so that’s good. Then spent a few days doing family stuff (lot of family stuff). One of the things with kids is, once they reach a certain age, they’re no longer yours to talk about – I used to talk about my kids all the time (on the blog and on social media) because they were delightful little wonders oblivious of most things but especially the internet (except for youtube videos) but now they’re 18 and 15 and as much as I’d love to share stuff about them, stuff I’m proud of, concerned about or just generally parent things, I just can’t. That stuff is theirs. But know I love them, and know that there’s often lots to talk about and I just can’t.

Have finally begun another Devlin Waugh strip, six parter. No deadlines, suspect it’ll not get scheduled for some time. For some artists this is great, for me, it’s a curse. I know if I attacked it the way I normally attack work I’d get it finished in a fortnight, but instead it’s taken me a fortnight to even open the script … because … no deadlines.

On the writing front, I haven’t really had a chance to open the script again on the WHITE RABBIT story. And again self doubt kicks in and I think, really Paul, this is the story you’re going to spend your precious time on earth drawing, something no-one will likely read, you’ll not likely enjoy (not nearly enough monsters) and something that no-one is paying you for? SHUT UP INNER MONOLOGUE.

As a side note, do you inner monologue? I do a lot. Turns out not every one does. Even as I type this I hear it in my own voice in my head. And if I pause to think of the wording, I’ll hear it in my head. Apparently not as common as I thought. (Also: I will have full on dialogues with other people – as I imagine they would react – play out in my head. Honestly a bit of a curse, because you know this isn’t necessarily what they’d say/how they’d really react, so you play through all sorts of permutations. And it’s always been like this. Voices in my head, but not the mad kind, probably)

I’ve most of the next issue of A4 written. Trying desperately to write something that doesn’t end with death is hard though. (It’s been pointed out, correctly, that these stories are all debbie downers… truth is I’m not sure I know how to write anything else? but I should try) There’s six stories so far and I did have a seventh which might be funny, but it turns out I’ve forgotten it. As soon as I think of one of these shorts I write them in the notes app on the iphone and then get on with things, safe in the knowledge it’s there. Sometimes I take a while to do that, then other thoughts pop up and *pff* gone. This one has gone *pff* (And I bet it wasn’t that funny)

Been chatting to Alec Worley (lovely bloke, comic writer, his newsletter is here) and he’s been bullying me into moving over to substack. (I have a substack account but only use it for reading). He reckons it’s where the audience will be.

To be honest, I’m sort of fed up with all social media. It’s so balkanised now, I can’t auto post from the blog to twitter, or blusky (but can to mastodon, which I’ve otherwise sort of left fallow). There’s threads where I’m on but not. Instagram which I have but never really upkeep and half a dozen others I’ve forgotten. My patreon still exists but I’m a ghost on there now. (Though I do appreciate those people who may be seeing me in other places and putting money in to my patreon, believe me, it may not seem much but it helps!)

In the battle-with-my-ego front, enough good quality writers have said words to the effect of “but you’re writing is really good” that I’m starting to think there might be something in that. Or at least I might try and stop shying away from the title of writer. I’m really not comfortable with the title (I’m a comic artist who sometimes makes comics that don’t have writers attached … or I sometimes jot down ideas for stories that I never, ever finish) these are things I need to fix, though I’m not sure how that would happen, maybe writing something that is purely prose? or writing something for another artist? I dunno. It’s an interesting data point for now.

I will say I feel my career as a comic artist has been taken as far as it can really go (which I think I’ve said before, isn’t really a bad thing, I don’t mean “and I give up” I mean “well, I’m never gonna be the hot artist, the in demand artist, the first guy on your rolodex or the guy you know will shift the needle, but I WILL be the guy you phone cus the other guy dropped out and man alive this deadline is tight” and honestly, being the hot-artist is a fractionally tiny part of the industry, there’s not many hot artists. I did wistfully want to be an artists-artist. But I’ll settle for being the editors-artist.

Maybe writing stuff will allow me to move the needle in some other ways. I dunno.

Again, my mood is a little darker than usual, I’ll grant you.

All artists have their weaknesses, they follow them around from year to year, tripping them up in ways that they’ve tripped them up since they were formative little artlettes doodling in their maths books.