IP as Labor Policy, now forthcoming @nyulawreview (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…): the past few weeks’ pop headlines, first of @taylorswift13 putting her music back up on tiktok before the release of tortured poets dept because she bargained for IP ownership of her music with universal, then of sky ferreira's heart-wrenching performance at coachella after years of (in her own words) "being held hostage by" her record label (to which she signed when she was just a teen), cements the fact that we need to be talking about IP beyond the user/owner, licensor/licensee, infringing/noninfringing, less/more dichotomy that has predominated theory and scholarship in the past few decades. critics of IP call the system "rentseeking," which, again, focuses on the user/owner, licensor/licensee relationship. but if a real property analogy is apt at all, it is more appropriate to call IP a system of feudalism, in which large swaths of "creators," as the system has so euphemistically called them (and to which the dominant incentives theory assumes is the beneficiary of IP rights), are in fact serfs within the system, owing decades of their labor to vast content dynasties, who are euphemistically called "intermediaries" in IP parlance. (and sure, i'll accept that a few, like swift, are vassals.) and make no mistake--the arrival of AI (digital serfs!) will only deepen the inequalities within the IP system, rather than rid us of it all together. where many have long called for less IP, IP owners have, instead, only gotten more entrenched and larger through a series of M&A deals in the past decade, enabled by IP's rhetoric of bigger-is-better for content creation. my paper calls for more careful attention to how the balance of power is distributed WITHIN the system--and what we can do to ensure a more equitable distribution of IP's promised, but so often illusory, rewards to creators.