Taylor Swift can add “copyright educator” to her laundry list of achievements, as her struggle to control her work has done perhaps more than any artist’s (and she is far from the first) to raise awareness of copyright. The saga seems to have reached a happy conclusion earlier this summer as Swift was finally able to acquire the master rights to her first six albums from an investment firm called Shamrock Capital, owned by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of copyright poster boy Walt. As fans across the world celebrate the drop of her latest album, now is a good time to pause and reflect on how Taylor’s career has interacted with copyright.

Taylor relied on the limits of copyright to get her start as a country artist. Her chord progressions, melodic patterns, instrumentation, lyrical themes, and wordplay were pitch-perfect examples of the genre. Drawing on that tradition made it possible for Taylor to write new songs that stood on the shoulders of her heroes, folks like Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and LeAnn Rimes. She even wrote her first hit song about one: Tim McGraw. All this was possible because copyright doesn’t apply to basic building blocks of creativity, like genre and style. Taylor relied on copyright’s limits to launch her career.

After six successful albums, Taylor encountered a downside of copyright that many artists know all too well: most copyrights are owned by businesses, not artists. For most working creatives, copyright is something they lose quickly in a system of deals built for corporate greed. In music, most copyrights aren’t controlled by artists like Taylor; they’re controlled by people like her nemesis, Scooter.

Taylor’s first six records were released under a deal with Big Machine. Under that deal, she didn’t “own her masters” (the copyrights in the actual recordings). Big Machine did. Taylor was entitled only to a revenue share from sales. After becoming a star, she left Big Machine for a better deal that gave her ownership of future recordings.

Then Scooter Braun bought Big Machine in a $300 million deal backed by the Carlyle Group. Taylor “pleaded for a chance to own [her] work” and was crushed when the rights went to Braun, who she said had “tried to dismantle” her career. Her life’s work now belonged to someone she considered a bully. And the transaction was perfectly legal. Once copyrights are sold, the new owner has the rights, and the creator has nothing. 

But Taylor fought back. She realized Big Machine only owned those recordings, not the underlying songs. Braun’s copyrights couldn’t stop her from re-recording and releasing new versions, this time fully owned by her. Doing so has “obliterated the market” for Braun’s recordings (as long as Scooter controlled the rights, all my early Swift albums were going to be Taylor’s Versions), and no one thinks that’s unfair. Copyright gives Braun only the right to distribute those specific recordings, not the power to stop new ones. Taylor relied on copyright’s limits to reclaim her work.

Now Taylor has been able to reclaim her rights, for an undisclosed amount. Taylor says the purchase was only possible because of the wildly successful Eras Tour (which sold more than $2 billion in tickets), so the sum involved in getting her rights back must be quite substantial. This is not a model of autonomy that most artists can follow. But there are some lessons here for those interested in the intersection between copyright, creativity, and commerce.

There’s nothing unfair about using copyright’s limits. Creativity like Taylor’s is always built on existing culture. AI tools are trained on prior works, too, and what they take are the basic building blocks, genre, mood, theme, style. These are the same elements Taylor “borrowed” from her country heroes, and later from dance and pop music. The next Taylor Swift may use AI tools alongside her guitar and pens to refine a song idea. That’s just as fair as the borrowing that’s always been part of creativity.

Giving copyright holders more control over future creativity isn’t the same as giving artists more control. Scooter Braun owns the copyrights in Taylor’s first six albums, and people like him, “men who had no part in creating it”, own most commercially valuable copyrights. If courts hand control of AI to copyright holders, it won’t be Taylor calling the shots. It’ll be Scooter and the Carlyle Group. 

What the next Taylor Swift needs is a balanced copyright system, one that gives her a fair shot at selling her music but also the freedom to borrow and reimagine what came before her, including using AI, if she wants. Most importantly, she needs freedom from intimidation by the powerful figures and groups who control copyrights and who are always more interested in maximizing the value of their portfolios than they are in nurturing the next generation of artists.