Nerds like myself bitch and moan about how lame, “Hollywood” and mainstream Comic Con has become, and yet we still go. We go because the convention is really still great — it’s different than it used to be, but it’s great. We go because it’s a place where we can be “the cool kids” for the first time in our lives. We go because passing through the doors of the convention center into the exhibit hall is like walking through a magic portal into our childhoods — or into a place that is even better than childhood, somehow.

But there are parts of SDCC that are truly objectively broken. The most obvious symptom of breakage — the thing most of the people I’ve spoken with about the convention find most galling — is the functioning of Hall H. The line, the camping out, and the people who sleep through presentations they could not possibly be bothered to care about, all for the sole purpose of seeing what these days amount to carefully orchestrated (for the most part) Hollywood PR and marketing presentations.

For those unfamiliar, Hall H is the largest of the rooms inside the convention center seating about 6100 people, according to Wikipedia. Historically, it had been the venue for small, independent film and media projects hoping to build enough momentum and public support to actually make money, see wide release, or spring board the creators on to larger, better funded projects. It was the means by which fledgling, struggling, or unknown efforts would become known and hopefully earn distribution deals.

The projects that feature prominently in Hall H in recent years are no longer those sorts of projects, but instead massive, well-funded undertakings whose backers want to whip a targeted audience of already-rabid fans into an army of mouth-frothing social media advocates. Similar symptoms of this kind of incursion can be witnessed all throughout the many venues at the convention, from smaller-room panels to the exhibit hall itself, which looks increasingly like a scene from E3, but Hall H is the most directly corrupted aspect of the Comic Con experience.

At times, the line travels through switchbacks filling the grassy area outside of the convention center, then across the road towards the Hilton hotel, then down the sidewalk and into Seaport Village, leaving people waiting in line for literally twelve hours or more, often still not managing to get in to see the panel they wanted, and causing many to choose to camp out on the sidewalks and grass near the convention center overnight. The problem of overnight camping has grown so massive that rather than attempting to discourage it (which I believe the city and the convention did try a few years back), policies have evolved around controlling it. Of course, sleeping on the ground in the middle of downtown San Diego is taxing even for the hardiest convention goer, especially since it’s bracketed by hours of walking back and forth across the con, shopping, heated debates over the nature of Nazgul, and so on. This year, people who had “slept” outside of Hall H prior to the Friday and Saturday programs were sleeping (note the lack of quotation marks) in the hall during live panels — filling seats real fans might have filled — while waiting for later panels.

The Fix

The fix I propose is actually a pretty simple one: only allow content into Hall H (or anywhere at the convention — otherwise you’re simply shuffling the problem around) if the owners of that content are comfortable sharing any part or all of it under the terms of a Creative Commons (any of the possible CC licenses are acceptable and content-creators who “get it” will choose liberal terms). The creative commons licenses are to media what the GPL (and its various derivatives) are to source-code — they are unique and brilliant in that that allow content creators to specify the kinds of sharing and re-mixing they want done with their content, but they allow for room to share. As a producer of content, you’re not necessarily giving away your work into the public domain, but you are explicitly allowing it to be (at the very least) shared widely.

In other words, I should be able to sit in the audience at Hall H and broadcast from a portable device directly onto my website (with reasonable attribution, as required) or YouTube, or FaceBook. Alternatively, I should be able to record and publish to YouTube a compilation of all the various previews I witnessed during the weekend, or share them on my blog, or with my friends on Facebook.

This will spare us all the repeated “once again, please do not record….” messages, because that would be silly! It will bring to the convention content creators who want or even need word of mouth (and viral internet-sharing, which is far more effective), not only those publishers hoping to build on already viable, successful properties.

Creators who don’t “get it” will either choose the most restrictive CC license and continue to bring their goodies to the convention, or will take their toys (which they’ll end up sharing with us in a few short months anyway, if they want to make money) and go home, leaving the convention for the rest of us. Surely the convention could survive the absence of Warner Brothers or similar panels, since passes sell out literally within seconds of the registration site being opened.

Kevin Smith “gets it.” When he previewed “Tusk” this year, the announcement that preceded the viewing of the preview was essentially encouraging the audience to record, share, republish and go nuts. That’s actually the kind of behavior a content-creator at the convention should want, and it’s frankly ridiculous to expect that somehow your content wouldn’t leak out of a room of 6100 people armed with smart phones. Therefore, embrace it, Comic-Con! Tell the people bringing their massive blockbuster movie/series previews that if they want to be at SDCC, they’ll have to expect their content to spread virally. Tell them that you’ll be re-broadcasting the whole Hall H experience into 10 other conference rooms live, and let the Hall H line disburse to those rooms! Put up a huge screen in PetCo and let attendees fill up the seats in the ballpark, rather than sleeping overnight on the sidewalk by Seaport Village.

Let the convention go back to being about sharing our various nerd-fetishes (even if they’ve grown up to become mainstream interests) undiluted and without (or at least with less) queueing. Ditch the competition and unpleasantness that comes from having to vie for space in line, or seats in a viewing hall that can only support a tiny fraction of the convention’s full population.