[Guest Book Review] Creative Value Chains – Copyright and Beyond for a Better Value Distribution

The IPKat has received and is pleased to host the review of Creative Value Chains – Copyright and Beyond for a Better Value Distribution by Yaniv Benhamou (University of Geneva). This book review has been prepared by Katfriend Peter Ling (attorney-at-law, Zurich). 

Over to Peter:

Who captures most value in today's creative economy and is copyright the right tool to fix any imbalance? In Creative Value Chains, Prof. Yaniv Benhamou tackles these questions head-on, delivering a remarkably ambitious book that moves beyond IP analysis into cultural policy, platform economics, and even some genuinely radical thought experiments.

The Diagnosis

The book opens (Part I) with a grounded, well-sourced account of how digital technology (including but not limited to artificial intelligence) has reorganized value creation and distribution in music, visual arts, and video games. The book greatly benefits from the fact that its author is not only a lawyer and a law professor, but also a musician. The description of the music industry in particular reads more like a report from an industry insider rather than a review of legal literature. The findings are sobering and an eye-opener for anyone interested in the current state of play of the creative industry.

A central idea from the outset is that the "creative value chain" is populated not just by authors and performers, but also by platform workers and digital workers whose contribution is data or attention, rather than copyrightable expression. The book accordingly looks at all actors and all valuable inputs, whether copyright-protected or not. 

The description of the state of play also reveals how the three examined industries (music, visual arts, video games) seem to live on different planets for some aspects, but suffer from similar ailings for other aspects. For example, the art market has so far resisted digitization more stubbornly than music, but the vast majority of visual artists capture a very small share of the value created in almost all transactions that are freely negotiated with platforms and gatekeepers. Video games, meanwhile, have become the dominant creative industry globally, organized increasingly around a games-as-a-service model with 3.5 billion players worldwide and a turnover superior to music and cinema combined.

The Prescriptions

Part II is where the real fireworks start. Benhamou moves from diagnosis to a genuinely comprehensive menu of solutions: legal (Chapter 4), political (Chapter 5), and "individual and technological" (Chapter 6). This breadth is one of the book's real strengths: it speaks not just to IP lawyers, but to anyone tracking where creative value chains are headed.

Legal fixes

Photo from Peter Ling.

On streaming, Benhamou first examines the idea of a specific collectively managed remuneration right, a solution most national copyright laws lack, unlike for broadcasting for example. The book presents the obvious and non-obvious upsides, but it is also refreshingly honest about its limits: a new right does not change the underlying "size of the pie," nor does it solve streaming fraud or private-international-law fragmentation that lets platforms forum-shop toward more permissive regimes.

On AI remuneration, the book maps the polarized camps: "maximalists" (creators, labels, publishers) wanting copyright clarified and strengthened, versus "minimalists" (platforms, AI developers, open-source advocates) who see strong copyright as mainly benefiting those with the resources to enforce it. Between the extremes, Benhamou explores options including data trusts, opt-in licensing, collectively managed remuneration rights, and (perhaps most provocatively) extending the CDSM Article 17 platform-liability model to AI itself.

One particularly sharp observation is that if rights holders are given an exclusive right to withdraw their works from AI training, the predictable long-run effect is that withdrawn works will gradually disappear from AI outputs altogether, and their creators may eventually have to pay to become visible again. A pure exclusive right, Benhamou argues, is therefore probably the wrong tool for most creators.

One of the book's most original proposals is a hybrid licensing architecture that inverts today's contractual logic: instead of platforms dictating terms of service, rights holders would select from standardized, Creative Commons-style modular licenses with a copyleft "share alike" clause propagating downstream. Data intermediaries or sector-specific data trusts would enforce compliance. It is a well-thought-through model, and beyond describing its advantages, Benhamou is also admirably candid about the coordination overhead and the risk that value distributed to millions of small contributors becomes merely symbolic once management costs are deducted.

Political and technological fixes

Chapter 5 surveys measures ranging from the realistic (artist social security, transparency rules, targeted subsidies) to the radical (universal basic income for creators, turnover taxes on platforms and AI models, employee profit-sharing). The book wisely suggests sequencing such ideas: short-term and uncontroversial reforms should be implemented first, structural and more controversial ideas can wait until later.

Chapter 6 is, deliberately so, the most speculative (and perhaps the most fun). The section on "algorithmic resistance" reads like a digital-age Luddite handbook: dataset-poisoning tools (Glaze, Nightshade, Nepenthes) feed AI crawlers unusable data, while creators use altered spellings and coded hashtags to game platform visibility. But, as Benhamou concedes, resistance may be futile — poisoning invites an arms race that simply increases energy costs, while visibility hacks work within platform logics rather than challenging them.

The book's most radical proposal comes last: "input-as-commons," treating AI training data as a collective public good, potentially tokenized on a blockchain and managed like a community fishery. Utopian? Maybe. But as a thought experiment about where digital culture could go, it is a stimulating close.

Verdict

Creative Value Chains is an unusually rich book for its size. Part I alone is essential reading for anyone looking for a clear, well-sourced account of how streaming, NFTs, and generative AI have already reorganized creative industries. Part II delivers a genuinely comprehensive survey of legal, political, and technological responses. The inclusion of political and infrastructure-level proposals is what sets this book apart from most IP scholarship in my view. Benhamou's ambition occasionally outruns the available space. One would like to read more about, say, the copyright status of prompting or the data-trust blueprint described in the book. However, for a book covering this fast-moving field with genuine interdisciplinary breadth, those are quibbles rather than flaws. Recommended for IP practitioners, policymakers, and anyone who cares about how creative work is valued in the age of AI.

Details

Publisher: Bristol University Press

Format: Paperback, also available as a free ebook here with a dedicated companion website here.

Extent: 274

ISBN: 978-1529249521