26/06/2026
Franklin Graves was in the room at the first White House creator economy conference. He also works at LinkedIn. He agreed to spend 30 minutes explaining what creators do not understand about their own legal rights.
You built the audience. The platform owns the relationship.
That's not an opinion. It's how the terms of service work on every major platform you use right now.
My co-host Ken Suzan had a conversation this week that I keep thinking about. Franklin Graves is Senior Product Counsel at LinkedIn, and he wrote the first law review article ever published specifically on creator economy law. He joined Ken Suzan on our podcast IP Fridays, and what he shared is something every creator, brand manager, and IP professional needs to hear.
Here are the four things that stuck with me most.
Your content is probably training an AI model right now. Whether you get compensated for that depends on four words buried in the terms of service you accepted without reading. Google is already doing this with YouTube. They are not hiding it. It is in the license grant.
The TikTok scare was a warning most people missed. When TikTok faced shutdown in the US, creators discovered overnight that their audience lived on someone else's property. Millions of followers, zero portability. The creators who were fine had built something the platform couldn't take away: a direct relationship outside of it. An email list. A newsletter. A community they actually owned.
Your voice is now an IP asset that needs legal protection. Tennessee passed the Elvis Act specifically to address AI voice cloning. Taylor Swift is filing trademarks on the sound of her own voice. This is not celebrity paranoia. It is the leading edge of a legal battle that will reach every creator who has ever published audio or video content. The law is still being written. The exploitation is already happening.
There is a legal difference between a creator and an influencer. Courts are only now starting to recognize it, and the distinction will determine who wins and who loses the IP disputes of the next decade. It comes down to intent, not follower count.
Franklin Graves spent years representing individual creators before moving in-house. He understands both sides of the platform relationship in a way very few lawyers do. His paper, Upload Complete, is the first serious academic attempt to give creator economy law a coherent framework.
The full conversation is in the latest episode of our podcast IP Fridays. You can listen to it on the website of IP Fridays and any other podcast player such as Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google podcast, Youtube, ...
What would you do if the platform you rely on most disappeared tomorrow?
