Tag: creative labor

The Devil’s Greatest Trick: Ro Khanna’s “Creator Bill of Rights” Is a Political Shield, Not a Charter for Creative Labor

La plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas! (“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”)

Charles Baudelaire, Le Joueur généreux

Ro Khanna’s so‑called “Creator Bill of Rights” is being sold as a long‑overdue charter for fairness in the digital economy—you know, like for gig workers. In reality, it functions as a political shield for Silicon Valley platforms: a non‑binding, influencer‑centric framework built on a false revenue‑share premise that bypasses child labor, unionized creative labor, professional creators, non‑featured artists, and the central ownership and consent crises posed by generative AI. 

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Mr. Khanna’s resolution treats transparency as leverage, consent as vibes, and platform monetization as deus ex machina-style natural law of the singularity—while carefully avoiding enforceable rights, labor classification, copyright primacy, artist consent for AI training, work‑for‑hire abuse, and real remedies against AI labs for artists. What flows from his assumptions is not a “bill of rights” for creators, but a narrative framework designed to pacify the influencer economy and legitimize platform power at the exact moment that judges are determining that creative labor is being illegally scraped, displaced, and erased by AI leviathans including some publicly traded companies with trillion-dollar market caps.

The First Omission: Child Labor in the Creator Economy

Rep. Khanna’s newly unveiled “Creator Bill of Rights” has been greeted with the kind of headlines Silicon Valley loves: Congress finally standing up for creators, fairness, and transparency in the digital economy. But the very first thing it doesn’t do should set off alarm bells. The resolution never meaningfully addresses child labor in the creator economy, a sector now infamous for platform-driven exploitation of minors through user generated content, influencer branding, algorithmic visibility contests, and monetized childhood.  (Wikipedia is Exhibit A, Facebook Exhibit B, YouTube Exhibit C and Instagram Exhibit D.)

There is no serious discussion of child worker protections and all that comes with it, often under state laws: working-hour limits, trust accounts, consent frameworks, or the psychological and economic coercion baked into platform monetization systems. For a document that styles itself as a “bill of rights,” that omission alone is disqualifying. But perhaps understandable given AI Viceroy David Sacks’ obsession with blocking enforcement of state laws that “impede” AI.

And it’s not an isolated miss. Once you read Khanna’s framework closely, a pattern emerges. This isn’t a bill of rights for creators. It’s a political shield for platforms that is built on a false economic premise, framed around influencers, silent on professional creative labor, evasive on AI ownership and training consent, and carefully structured to avoid enforceable obligations.

The Foundational Error: Treating Revenue Share as Natural Law that Justifies A Stream Share Threshold

The foundational error appears right at the center of the resolution: its uncritical embrace of the Internet’s coin of the realm: revenue-sharing. Khanna calls for “clear, transparent, and predictable revenue-sharing terms” between platforms and creators. That phrase sounds benign, even progressive. But it quietly locks in the single worst idea anyone ever had for royalty economics: big-pool platform revenue share.  An idea that is being rejected by pretty much everyone except Spotify with its stream share threshold. In case Mr. Khanna didn’t get the memo, artist-centric is the new new thing.

Revenue sharing treats creators as participants in a platform monetization program, not as rights-holders.  You know, “partners.”  Artists don’t get a share of Spotify stock, they get a “revenue share” because they’re “partnering” with Spotify.   If that’s how Spotify treats “partners”….

Under that revenue share model, the platform defines what counts as revenue, what gets excluded, how it’s allocated, which metrics matter, and how the rules change. The platform controls all the data. The platform controls the terms. And the platform retains unilateral power to rewrite the deal. Hey “partner,” that’s not compensation grounded in intellectual property or labor rights. It’s a dodge grounded in platform policy.

We already know how this story ends. Big-pool revenue share regimes hide cross-subsidies, reward algorithm gaming over quality, privilege viral noise over durable cultural work, and collapse bargaining power into opaque market share payments of microscopic proportion. Revenue share deals destroy price signals, hollow out licensing markets, and make creative income volatile and non-forecastable. This is exceptionally awful for songwriters and nobody can tell a songwriter today what that burger on Tuesday will actually bring.

A advertising revenue-share model penalizes artists because they receive only a tiny fraction of the ads served against their own music, while platforms like Google capture roughly half of the total advertising revenue generated across the entire network. Naturally they love it.

Rev shares of advertising revenue are the core economic pathology behind what happened to music, journalism, and digital publishing over the last fifteen years.  As we have seen from Spotify’s stream share threshold, a platform can unilaterally decide to cut off payments at any time for any absurd reason and get away with it.  And Khanna’s resolution doesn’t challenge that logic. It blesses it.

He doesn’t say creators are entitled to enforceable royalties tied to uses of their work at rates set by the artist. He doesn’t say there should be statutory floors, audit rights, underpayment penalties, nondiscrimination rules, or retaliation protections. He doesn’t say platforms should be prohibited from unilaterally redefining the pie. He says let’s make the revenue share more “transparent” and “predictable.” That’s not a power shift. That’s UX optimization for exploitation.

This Is an Influencer Bill, Not a Creator Bill

The second fatal flaw is sociological. Khanna’s resolution is written for the creator economy, not the creative economy.

The “creator” in Khanna’s bill is a YouTuber, a TikToker, a Twitch streamer, a podcast personality, a Substack writer, a platform-native entertainer (but no child labor protection). Those are real jobs, and the people doing them face real precarity. But they are not the same thing as professional creative labor. They are usually not professional musicians, songwriters, composers, journalists, photographers, documentary filmmakers, authors, screenwriters, actors, directors, designers, engineers, visual artists, or session musicians. They are not non-featured performers. They are not investigative reporters. They are not the people whose works are being scraped at industrial scale to train generative AI systems.

Those professional creators are workers who produce durable cultural goods governed by copyright, contract, and licensing markets. They rely on statutory royalties, collective bargaining, residuals, reuse frameworks, audit rights, and enforceable ownership rules. They face synthetic displacement and market destruction from AI systems trained on their work without consent. Khanna’s resolution barely touches any of that. It governs platform participation. It does not govern creative labor.  It’s not that influencers shouldn’t be able to rely on legal protections; it’s that if you’re going to have a bill of rights for creators it should include all creators and very often the needs are different.  Starting with collective bargaining and unions.

The Total Bypass of Unionized Labor

Nowhere is this shortcoming more glaring than in the complete bypass of unionized labor. The framework lives in a parallel universe where SAG-AFTRA, WGA, DGA, IATSE, AFM, Equity, newsroom unions, residuals, new-use provisions, grievance procedures, pension and health funds, minimum rates, credit rules, and collective bargaining simply do not exist. That entire legal architecture is invisible.  And Khanna’s approach could easily roll back the gains on AI protections that unions have made through collective bargaining.

Which means the resolution is not attempting to interface with how creative work actually functions in film, television, music, journalism, or publishing. It is not creative labor policy. It is platform fairness rhetoric.

Invisible Labor: Non-Featured Artists and the People the Platform Model Erases

The same erasure applies to non-featured artists and invisible creative labor. Session musicians, backup singers, supporting actors, dancers, crew, editors, photographers on assignment, sound engineers, cinematographers — these people don’t live inside platform revenue-share dashboards. They are paid through wage scales, reuse payments, residuals, statutory royalty regimes, and collective agreements.

None of that exists in Khanna’s world. His “creator” is an account, not a worker.

AI Without Consent Is Not Accountability

The AI plank in the resolution follows the same pattern of rhetorical ambition and structural emptiness. Khanna gestures at transparency, consent, and accountability for AI and synthetic media. But he never defines what consent actually means.

Consent for training? For style mimicry? For voice cloning? For archival scraping of journalism and music catalogs? For derivative outputs? For model fine-tuning? For prompt exploitation? For replacement economics?

The bill carefully avoids the training issue. Which is the whole issue.

A real AI consent regime would force Congress to confront copyright primacy, opt-in licensing, derivative works, NIL rights, data theft, model ownership, and platform liability. Khanna’s framework gestures at harms while preserving the industrial ingestion model intact.

The Ownership Trap: Work-for-Hire and AI Outputs

This omission is especially telling. Nowhere does Khanna say platforms may not claim authorship or ownership of AI outputs by default. Nowhere does he say AI-assisted works are not works made for hire. Nowhere does he say users retain rights in their contributions and edits. Nowhere does he say WFH boilerplate cannot be used to convert prompts into platform-owned assets.

That silence is catastrophic.

Right now, platforms are already asserting ownership contractually, claiming assignments of outputs, claiming compilation rights, claiming derivative rights, controlling downstream licensing, locking creators out of monetization, and building synthetic catalogs they own. Even though U.S. law says purely AI-generated content isn’t copyrightable absent human authorship, platforms can still weaponize terms of service, automated enforcement, and contractual asymmetry to create “synthetic  ownership” or “practical control.” Khanna’s resolution says nothing about any of it.

Portable Benefits as a Substitute for Labor Rights

Then there’s the portable-benefits mirage. Portable benefits sound progressive. They are also the classic substitute for confronting misclassification. So first of all, Khanna starts our saying that “gig workers” in the creative economy don’t get health care—aside from the union health plans, I guess. But then he starts with the portable benefits mirage. So which is it? Surely he doesn’t mean nothing from nothing leaves nothing?

If you don’t want to deal with whether creators are actually employees, whether platforms owe payroll taxes, whether wage-and-hour law applies, whether unemployment insurance applies, whether workers’ comp applies, whether collective bargaining rights attach, or…wait for it…stock options apply…you propose portable benefits without dealing with the reality that there are no benefits. You preserve contractor status. You socialize costs and privatize upside. You deflect labor-law reform and health insurance reform for that matter. You look compassionate. And you change nothing structurally.

Khanna’s framework sits squarely in that tradition of nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

A Non-Binding Resolution for a Reason

The final tell is procedural. Khanna didn’t introduce a bill. He introduced a non-binding resolution.

No enforceable rights. No regulatory mandates. No private causes of action. No remedies. No penalties. No agency duties. No legal obligations.

This isn’t legislation. It’s political signaling.

What This Really Is: A Political Shield

Put all of this together and the picture becomes clear. Khanna’s “Creator Bill of Rights” is built on a false revenue-share premise. It is framed around influencers. It bypasses professional creators. It bypasses unions. It bypasses non-featured artists. It bypasses child labor. It bypasses training consent. It bypasses copyright primacy. It bypasses WFH abuse. It bypasses platform ownership grabs. It bypasses misclassification. It bypasses enforceability. I give you…Uber.

It doesn’t fail because it’s hostile to creators, rather because it is indifferent to creators. It fails because it redefines “creator” downward until every hard political and legal question disappears.

And in doing so, it functions as a political shield for the very platforms headquartered in Khanna’s district.

When the Penny Drops

Ro Khanna’s “Creator Bill of Rights” isn’t a rights charter.

It’s a narrative framework designed to stabilize the influencer economy, legitimize platform compensation models, preserve contractor status, soften AI backlash, avoid copyright primacy, avoid labor-law reform, avoid ownership reform, and avoid real accountability.

It treats transparency as leverage. It treats consent as vibes. It treats revenue share as natural law. It treats AI as branding. It treats creative labor as content. It treats platforms as inevitable.

And it leaves out the people who are actually being scraped, displaced, devalued, erased, and replaced: musicians, journalists, photographers, actors, directors, songwriters, composers, engineers, non-featured performers, visual artists, and professional creators.

If Congress actually wants a bill of rights for creators, it won’t start with influencer UX and non-binding resolutions. It will start with enforceable intellectual-property rights, training consent, opt-in regimes, audit rights, statutory floors, collective bargaining, exclusion of AI outputs from work-for-hire, limits on platform ownership claims, labor classification clarity, and real remedies.

Until then, this isn’t a bill of rights.

It’s a press release with footnotes.

Less Than Zero: The Significance of the Per Stream Rate and Why It Matters

Spotify’s insistence that it’s “misleading” to compare services based on a derived per-stream rate reveals exactly how out of touch the company has become with the very artists whose labor fuels its stock price. Artists experience streaming one play at a time, not as an abstract revenue pool or a complex pro-rata formula. Each stream represents a listener’s decision, a moment of engagement, and a microtransaction of trust. Dismissing the per-stream metric as irrelevant is a rhetorical dodge that shields Spotify from accountability for its own value proposition. (The same applies to all streamers, but Spotify is the only one that denies the reality of the per-stream rate.)

Spotify further claims that users don’t pay per stream but for access as if that negates the artist’s per stream rate payments. It is fallacious to claim that because Spotify users pay a subscription fee for “access,” there is no connection between that payment and any one artist they stream. This argument treats music like a public utility rather than a marketplace of individual works. In reality, users subscribe because of the artists and songs they want to hear; the value of “access” is wholly derived from those choices and the fans that artists drive to the platform. Each stream represents a conscious act of consumption and engagement that justifies compensation.

Economically, the subscription fee is not paid into a vacuum — it forms a revenue pool that Spotify divides among rights holders according to streams. Thus, the distribution of user payments is directly tied to which artists are streamed, even if the payment mechanism is indirect. To say otherwise erases the causal relationship between fan behavior and artist earnings.

The “access” framing serves only to obscure accountability. It allows Spotify to argue that artists are incidental to its product when, in truth, they are the product. Without individual songs, there is nothing to access. The subscription model may bundle listening into a single fee, but it does not sever the fundamental link between listener choice and the artist’s right to be paid fairly for that choice.

Less Than Zero Effect: AI, Infinite Supply and Erasing Artist

In fact, this “access” argument may undermine Spotify’s point entirely. If subscribers pay for access, not individual plays, then there’s an even greater obligation to ensure that subscription revenue is distributed fairly across the artists who generate the listening engagement that keeps fans paying each month. The opacity of this system—where listeners have no idea how their money is allocated—protects Spotify, not artists. If fans understood how little of their monthly fee reached the musicians they actually listen to, they might demand a user-centric payout model or direct licensing alternatives. Or they might be more inclined to use a site like Bandcamp. And Spotify really doesn’t want that.

And to anticipate Spotify’s typical deflection—that low payments are the label’s fault—that’s not correct either. Spotify sets the revenue pool, defines the accounting model, and negotiates the rates. Labels may divide the scraps, but it’s Spotify that decides how small the pie is in the first place either through its distribution deals or exercising pricing power.

Three Proofs of Intention

Daniel Ek, the Spotify CEO and arms dealer, made a Dickensian statement that tells you everything you need to know about how Spotify perceives their role as the Streaming Scrooge—“Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content”.

That statement perfectly illustrates how detached he has become from the lived reality of the people who actually make the music that powers his platform’s market capitalization (which allows him to invest in autonomous weapons). First, music is not generic “content.” It is art, labor, and identity. Reducing it to “content” flattens the creative act into background noise for an algorithmic feed. That’s not rhetoric; it’s a statement of his values. Of course in his defense, “near zero cost” to a billionaire like Ek is not the same as “near zero cost” to any artist. This disharmonious statement shows that Daniel Ek mistakes the harmony of the people for the noise of the marketplace—arming algorithms instead of artists.

Second, the notion that the cost of creating recordings is “close to zero” is absurd. Real artists pay for instruments, studios, producers, engineers, session musicians, mixing, mastering, artwork, promotion, and often the cost of simply surviving long enough to make the next record or write the next song. Even the so-called “bedroom producer” incurs real expenses—gear, software, electricity, distribution, and years of unpaid labor learning the craft. None of that is zero. As I said in the UK Parliament’s Inquiry into the Economics of Streaming, when the day comes that a soloist aspires to having their music included on a Spotify “sleep” playlist, there’s something really wrong here.

Ek’s comment reveals the Silicon Valley mindset that art is a frictionless input for data platforms, not an enterprise of human skill, sacrifice, and emotion. When the CEO of the world’s dominant streaming company trivializes the cost of creation, he’s not describing an economy—he’s erasing one.

While Spotify tries to distract from the “per-stream rate,” it conveniently ignores the reality that whatever it pays “the music industry” or “rights holders” for all the artists signed to one label still must be broken down into actual payments to the individual artists and songwriters who created the work. Labels divide their share among recording artists; publishers do the same for composers and lyricists. If Spotify refuses to engage on per-stream value, what it’s really saying is that it doesn’t want to address the people behind the music—the very creators whose livelihoods depend on those streams. In pretending the per-stream question doesn’t matter, Spotify admits the artist doesn’t matter either.

Less Than Zero or Zeroing Out: Where Do We Go from Here?

The collapse of artist revenue and the rise of AI aren’t coincidences; they’re two gears in the same machine. Streaming’s economics rewards infinite supply at near-zero unit cost which is really the nugget of truth in Daniel Ek’s statements. This is evidenced by Spotify’s dalliances with Epidemic Sound and the like. But—human-created music is finite and costly; AI music is effectively infinite and cheap. For a platform whose margins improve as payout obligations shrink, the logical endgame is obvious: keep the streams, remove the artists.

  • Two-sided market math. Platforms sell audience attention to advertisers and access to subscribers. Their largest variable cost is royalties. Every substitution of human tracks with synthetic “sound-alikes,” noise, functional audio, or AI mashup reduces royalty liability while keeping listening hours—and revenue—intact. You count the AI streams just long enough to reduce the royalty pool, then you remove them from the system, only to be replace by more AI tracks. Spotify’s security is just good enough to miss the AI tracks for at least one royalty accounting period.
  • Perpetual content glut as cover. Executives say creation costs are “near zero,” justifying lower per-stream value. That narrative licenses a race to the bottom, then invites AI to flood the catalog so the floor can fall further.
  • Training to replace, not to pay. Models ingest human catalogs to learn style and voice, then output “good enough” music that competes with the very works that trained them—without the messy line item called “artist compensation.”
  • Playlist gatekeeping. When discovery is centralized in editorial and algorithmic playlists, platforms can steer demand toward low-or-no-royalty inventory (functional audio, public-domain, in-house/commissioned AI), starving human repertoire while claiming neutrality.
  • Investor alignment. The story that scales is not “fair pay”; it’s “gross margin expansion.” AI is the lever that turns culture into a fixed cost and artists into externalities.

Where does that leave us? Both streaming and AI “work” best for Big Tech, financially, when the artist is cheap enough to ignore or easy enough to replace. AI doesn’t disrupt that model; it completes it. It also gives cover through a tortured misreading through the “national security” lens so natural for a Lord of War investor like Mr. Ek who will no doubt give fellow Swede and one of the great Lords of War, Alfred Nobel, a run for his money. (Perhaps Mr. Ek will reimagine the Peace Prize.) If we don’t hard-wire licensing, provenance, and payout floors, the platform’s optimal future is music without musicians.

Plato conceived justice as each part performing its proper function in harmony with the whole—a balance of reason, spirit, and appetite within the individual and of classes within the city. Applied to AI synthetic works like those generated by Sora 2, injustice arises when this order collapses: when technology imitates creation without acknowledging the creators whose intellect and labor made it possible. Such systems allow the “appetitive” side—profit and scale—to dominate reason and virtue. In Plato’s terms, an AI trained on human art yet denying its debt to artists enacts the very disorder that defines injustice.