The IP Jihad ❀
The concept of intellectual property has always been around.
In Ancient Greece, the city of Sybaris allowed exclusive rights to some culinary recipes.
It started - or at least influenced - the renaissance era in Italy, with the Venetian patent statute.
This patent gave people a way to protect their inventions during 10 years.
IP was pretty much a byproduct of the printing press, which created a need to protect written works.
Fast-forward to 2025, everything is becoming an IP - and at the same time we're still using the same technique as the renaissance.
Speaking about artistic IPs, applied to movies, video game characters or anime waifus, it's the same rules. It applies during the life of the creator + 70 years. For a franchise like Pokémon, it will stay a walled garden until 2091.
Our world is evolving so quickly. IPs has become a behemoth.
When the biggest IP in 1945 (Superman) was worth $5M, the biggest IP in 2024 is worth $100B.
Hollywood emerged because it was far away from the East Coast & IP laws didn’t apply there.
It's one of the highest growing industry, and it's growing as a multimodal experience : Mario movies, Avenger games or Fortnite collaboration.
But this model is on the brink of collapse. The reason ? Internet.
The original sin of the internet has been to allow people to download IP derivatives illegally: games, music or movies.
Each of those industries were on the verge of collapse, especially music.
We were a few months away from a bankruptcy of all the majors, only getting saved by their other activities and by streaming.
Allelujah, we're so back. Except, it was just the warming up.
Streaming made it ultra cheap and ultra convenient to access IP derivatives. In one click, you can access the latest Marvel or Disney show.
And it worked because you don't have any alternative.
You won't make a movie or a video game by yourself, right ?
If everyone can be their own IP - IP is useless.
The industry survived because it was gate kept by loads of money.
A video game can cost a thousand millions to launch.
A good movie, pretty much the same price.
Last year, doing a good quality movie with AI was almost impossible.
Today, we can produce 100s of 10s videos for less than $10.
Tomorrow, we will create a movie for less than we pay Netflix monthly.
I don't think Nintendo, Disney and Marvel are dead.
I'm just convinced they need to reinvent themselves, like they did during the Web2 era.
Now, let me introduce the reason @merv_wtf (you will know more about us later) exists.
Milady.
Milady ?
Milady is a NFT collection.
NFTs were heavily inspired by traditional IP. The main selling point was to actually co-own an IP.
That's why we saw a lot of Bored Ape Yacht Club derivatives : soda can, movies, shirts, ...
But it ultimately didn't work, for one reason : an IP need to spread everywhere.
On our new world, you won't be able to spread an IP if it's closed.
It does not make any sense to ask for the approval of 10k different apes to make a movie with apes.
Milady was one of the first collection to embrace this new paradigm called cc0.
A very weird thing happened to this neo-chibi NFT collection.
Each time someone stole the collection to make money, the value of the NFT grew.
From a weird meme on the crypto Twitter, it became something shared by the most influential people of our world, from Elon Musk to Vitalik Buterin
If we give people autonomy, the best ideas and ultimately IPs, spread everywhere and take over the world.
Here we are, in 2025.
We've seen that giving people autonomy to create something using another person IP works. And that it actually grow the pie.
We've also seen that IPs as they exist are actually dead.
I can actually create a Pokémon movie for myself and my friends using an AI.
And while it's not available for everyone yet, it will become commoditized by social media like TikTok or even Netflix in the future - that are working on AI video models :')
Yet, I do think that creativity should be rewarded. I've spent two years of my life trying to give the music industry a way to grow the pie using NFTs.
I'm growing tired to see indie artists struggling to live while big IP landlords extracts billions.
And they are not even good at it, Palworld - which was a lazy rip-off of Pokémon IP, has been the biggest game of all time on Steam.
Can you imagine how big it could have been with Pokémon involved ?
What's the lazy solution for this ?
An Excel sheets, giving people a way to enroll and use an IP in exchange for revenue from the byproduct.
You could even put a blockchain on this, to extract some value from both parties.
But at the end of the day, you are not fixing any problem.
How does a brand make money on this technology ? No one knows.
Why would someone go to the blockchain to get access to an IP if they can replicate it with AI ?
As streaming showed us, the most convenient product wins at the end of the day.
Let's take a break from this boring IP stuff to talk about AI.
90% of the current AI hype has been focused on text-based LLMs.
They are great, enabled by new technology breakthrough - but mostly by a great UI.
The only limiting factors are they are text-based. Apart from us nerds, people don't spend their day reading stuff or looking at Wikipedia information.
Text based media consumption became popular in the 15th century.
Images are becoming the biggest driver of mimetic spread, with new type of memes.
Video games are the new behemoth of entertainment, becoming more consumed than movies.
And short videos are everywhere, especially in the youth.
Most content those days are generated by LLMs, then converted to brainrot with videos.
AI for "medias" uses an architecture called Diffusion. It basically generates something with noise.
Noise is key to create interesting worlds. Minecraft is procedurally generated with noise.
We can already fully generate an AI video game with noise.
With all the content we create, we should be able to generate thousand of these worlds.
Diffusion models are used to generate anything except text.
You can use them to generate a podcast or a mixtape.
You can even simulate worlds with them.
The craziest part of diffusion models is how moldable they are.
While LLMs have RAG & context windows, Diffusion models have adapters.
The most famous one is probably ControlNet, which enable you to generate an image similar to the structure of an existing image.
You also get IPAdapter to add the face of someone on an image.
The most powerful part of this is something called LoRAs, which are Low Ranking Adaptions of models.
Basically, you can influence a model to generate output similar to X images based on a small dataset of 5–10 images.
It has obviously been used to infringe IP, to create art similar to X artists or to make Mario or Minion artworks.
One thing that really amaze me is how powerful it is in a creative context.
Creativity is quite constrained in this world, most people just remix existing stuff by going on Pinterest or Are.na
Diffusion models enable you to explore the latent space & build your creativity using everything that ever existed in this planet.
In the nightcore OnlyFans aidoru baby-deer vocaloid furry rave of the dawning twenty-first-century mediascape, it cannot help but overspill these bounds. The more synthetic our environments, the greater our access to latent spaces of virtual affect becomes, and the greater our access to latent spaces of virtual affect, the more synthetic our environments become—this is the supernormal-hyperplastic loop.
Isn't it crazy ?
So what's that all about
Well, our mission at @merv_wtf is to enable people to create their own IP in a few clicks.
We leverage diffusion models to upgrade their inspiration and to transform an artwork into a creative engine.
Each creative engine is a fine-tuned LoRA model that can build images, movies and 3D worlds in one click.
And all of them are revenue bearing for their creator, using attribution & built-in royalties.
IP franchises that can create structures and supply tooling for pro fans to create content as an extension of the core IP will pull ahead of competitors.
If you can't articulate a coherent view of the future in 2025, you are basically NGMI.
MERV is a bet on the future of creativity, post AGI & pre-memetic warfare.
I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities.
While it doesn't make sense 20 years ago to see CNBC being soooo big while cameras sales were growing everywhere.
It doesn't make sense to see Nintendo or Sanrio being soooo big in 2025.
There will be a Cambrian explosion of creation.
And the winner won't be the more creative.
It will be the IP that make the most people rich.
No idea is simple when you have to plant it in someone else’s mind.
That's why we embrace crypto rails.
Kill the cultural landlords ❀
The future is here—it’s just not evenly imagined ❀
slopify it
