IP is Your Empire | Girl & The Goat | Chicago, IL | July 16, 2025
The Walt Disney Company sits at a $215 billion valuation. Built on mice, princesses, and intellectual property law.
Many creators who birthed those billion-dollar characters? They got participation trophies and pension worries.
This gap fascinates us like a car crash. Three letters that separate creative genius from generational wealth: I.P.
The Great Wealth Migration
Every work-for-hire contract is basically a lottery ticket transfer. Creators take the guaranteed $20. Corporations take the Powerball potential.
The scoreboard reads like a tragedy:
Comic creators who invented billion-dollar universes for grocery money
Songwriters who defined decades for session fees
Screenwriters who birthed franchises for union minimums
One side understood compound interest. The other understood this month's rent.
Is this theft or just bad math?
The Taylor Swift Chess Move
When Swift lost her masters through Big Machine's sale to Scooter Braun, she didn't tweet-storm. She didn't sue. She went Full Corleone—strictly business.
Re-recording entire albums. Creating competing masters. Generating hundreds of millions in new revenue. Teaching a billion-dollar lesson through action.
The move raised questions we can't shake:
Is ownership structure more creative than creation itself?
How do modern creators build IP portfolios like stock portfolios?
Where's the line between protecting your work and creative constipation?
Why do some creators build empires while others build other people's empires?
The Modern IP Chess Game
Smart creators play three-dimensional chess while others play tic-tac-toe:
Rights get sliced thinner than deli meat. Publishing here, merchandising there, adaptations in the vault. No single buyer gets the whole sandwich.
Reversion clauses work like boomerangs. Time bombs that bring rights home. Options that expire like milk. The long game beating the quick cash.
Geography becomes multiplication. Each territory is a different slot machine. The world is bigger than Hollywood's imagination.
But most creators never knew there was a game.
Questions That Keep Us Up
We're obsessed with the mechanics:
Why do creators still sign away their grandchildren's inheritance?
How did IP become the only asset that appreciates after death?
What happens when creators think like hedge funds?
Is the future more ownership or more "you'll own nothing and be happy"?
The gap between making things and owning things might be the most expensive ignorance available.
The Chicago IP Summit
July 16. Six people who've lived both sides gather in Chicago.
Including the IP attorney who structured Taylor Swift's catalog acquisition strategy. A former Warner Bros. executive now running three production companies. The comic creator whose IP became a $100M gaming franchise.
Not a lecture. A laboratory. Dissecting real contracts, proven strategies, expensive lessons.
Six seats because truth requires intimacy.