The Creator Economy: A Legal Playbook for Brands, Talent, and Agencies

The creator economy has grown into a $250 billion industry, and attorneys across practice areas are fielding questions they didn't anticipate. Clients are signing influencer deals, launching TikTok campaigns, and fielding AI licensing offers, often without internal expertise to evaluate the risks. Meanwhile, the legal landscape is shifting: generative AI has unsettled foundational copyright principles, the FTC is actively enforcing disclosure rules, and deepfakes are raising novel publicity rights questions that legislatures and courts are only beginning to address.

This course provides a practical legal framework for attorneys advising any stakeholder in the creator ecosystem: brands investing in influencer marketing, talent building media businesses, agencies brokering partnerships, and technology companies enabling the space. We will cover the core deal terms in creator agreements, the FTC compliance framework for sponsored content, and the intellectual property issues that arise when content, likeness, and creative work are the product. We will also survey the emerging questions around AI-generated content, synthetic media, and platform liability, with honest discussion of what remains unsettled and where practitioners should focus their attention.

Attorneys at all practice levels will gain useful insights from this program. It is designed for attorneys encountering the creator economy for the first time or for those looking to build a more structured understanding of a space they have only occasionally touched.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the creator economy ecosystem and identify the legal touchpoints for brands, creators, agencies, vendors, and platforms.
2. Recognize the key negotiation terms in influencer and content-creator agreements and understand how they allocate risk between the parties.
3. Explain the FTC's endorsement and disclosure framework to sponsored collaborations, co-branded product deals, ambassador programs, and equity arrangements, and identify the compliance and negotiation gaps that most commonly create exposure and kill deals.
4. Determine the intellectual property boundaries in creator deals, including content ownership, licensing and usage structures, and likeness rights.
5. Evaluate emerging legal questions around AI-generated content, synthetic media, agentic commerce, platform liability/volatility, and identify the areas of active development.