Creative Value Chains
Copyright and Beyond for a Better Value Distribution
The digital economy runs on our labour. It’s time to share the value.
Reviews
‘This exceptional book stands apart by offering a holistic and innovative analysis of creative value chains, bridging copyright and contract law with interdisciplinary, practice-based knowledge.’
Amélie Favreau, University Grenoble-Alpes
‘Essential read for creative industry professionals in music, visual arts and gaming, offering concrete political, legal and technological solutions to get creators paid and build fairer digital futures.’
Anthony Masure, Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD)
‘A MUST READ for those who want to understand the complexities of today’s vivid debate on ‘copyright grappling with GenAI’, and to design possible solutions that pay attention to the various interests, markets constraints and policy objectives behind this legacy institution.’
Alain Strowel, University Saint-Louis and UCLouvain
‘A masterpiece for anyone active in the creative industries, offering a unique toolkit for policymakers and individuals committed to improving value distribution and artists’ working conditions, while fostering cultural diversity and human creativity.’
Pierre-Alain Hug, City of Sion Culture and Education Department
‘An essential contribution to contemporary debates on cultural production, Creative Value Chains is authored by someone whose solid academic and legal expertise is matched by first-hand experience as a musician, offering a lucid and critical analysis of platform power and the multiple layers that shape creative markets.’
Sérgio Branco, Director, ITS Rio
About
Reclaiming Value for Creators and Digital Workers
Creative industries are increasingly dominated by digital platforms, yet the distribution of value within these sectors, from music and video games to visual arts, remains deeply unequal. Recent examples include the remuneration of artists on streaming platforms and the use of creative works in AI training data. This imbalance threatens human creativity and cultural diversity. In this book, Benhamou exposes the flaws in current models of value allocation and the inequities embedded within copyright systems. Focusing on the often-overlooked contributors to creative works, the book advocates rethinking copyright through a lens of distributive justice to ensure equitable compensation for all stakeholders in the creative process, including individual creators, invisible workers and digital workers.
Author
Yaniv Benhamou is Professor of Copyright and Information Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva, Director of the Digital Law Center (DLC), with a strong focus on the creative industries for 20 years, as well as an attorney-at-law and a practising musician. Hence, this book is the result of 20 years of scientific research, and artistic practice, two areas pursued in parallel, which have been able to feed into each other.
Press
POLICY BRIEFING: Creative value chains copyright and beyond
Digital platforms increasingly cannibalise the value generated by human creativity, from sharing platforms (TikTok), to streaming services (Spotify) and AI models (ChatGPT). This extraction of value from artists and internet users to platforms threatens cultural diversity and the sustainability of creative work. A new framework is needed to ensure fairer value distribution across the creative economy.
The creative ecosystem also remains too narrowly focused on initial acts of creation rather than recognising creativity as a value chain that spans production, distribution and use involving multiple contributors (creators, intermediaries, click and digital workers). The value also has multiple dimensions: A creative work generates not only economic but also social, cultural, educational and emotional value, which current frameworks fail to capture. Creative industries such as music, gaming and visual arts act as societal catalysts, often anticipating wider shifts in work, community governance and technology.
In this policy briefing, Yaniv Benhamou, author of Creative Value Chains, warns that digital platforms drain value from the creative ecosystem and calls for reforms to ensure fairer rewards for all contributors.
For press enquiries, please contact:
paul.stevens@bristol.ac.uk (publisher)
Book launches
Dates & places
Several book launch events are scheduled as of September 2026 in the form of performance-lecture Law by Music or regular book talks, including
- September 14 in Brussels at the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles
- September 24 in Geneva at Downtown Studio.
- Events are also planned in Montreal, Chicago, and Boston around October 2026 (dates to be confirmed).
Most book launch events will take the form of a “Law by Music” performance–lecture.
Video Clips
Summary of the book
A short video clip (4mn) explaining the book project.
Law by Music Performance-Lecture
To accompany the launch of his book, Benhamou proposes a unique “Law by Music” performance–lecture. Using live music and AI-generated visuals, he illustrates the legal and ethical challenges of creativity today: authorship boundaries between humans and AI, the use of training data, and the question of remuneration in the algorithmic era. See video clip of the performance-lecture Law by Music at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2025.