Rights, Revenue, and the Race Against Time: The Silent Heist You Never Heard Of

Billions in Lost Revenue, Vanishing Rights, and the Threat to Trust in Media

By John Byrne, CEO & founder of Writers’ Bloc.

Introduction: Copyright Ain’t Pretty

Imagine creating a piece of work that inspires a multi-billion-dollar franchise, only to receive peanuts in return. This is not some hypothetical scenario – it’s the stark reality for many freelance journalists and writers.

You are offered small, token fees in return for commissioned articles that take weeks to prepare and often spur the creation of further derivative works.

In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson wrote a wild, drug-fuelled feature for Rolling Stone that became Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, earning him royalties from both the book and the 1998 film starring Johnny Depp, contributing to his estimated $5 million net worth.

But Thompson is an outlier.

Most freelance journalists and writers see little beyond the initial commission fee, even when their work spawns massive cultural phenomena.

This is the story of over 1 million freelance journalists and 25,000–30,000 independent publishers worldwide, who are losing ownership and fair compensation for their work.

The Problem: Rights Stripped, Futures Stolen

Writers face staggering challenges in retaining ownership and benefiting from their work’s success.

Take Ken Li, whose 1998 Vibe article on street racing inspired the Fast and Furious franchise. Li received only a small, one-time fee to option the copyright for the first film (per the Independent, and Washington Post) that’s the only pay-check he ever saw, despite the franchise worth over $3 billion today.

This stark disparity serves as a cautionary tale, highlighting the critical need for writers to retain ownership and negotiate fair terms.

Similarly, Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 Wired article inspired the Oscar-winning film Argo. But as a Wired employee at the time, Bearman didn’t own his work – the publication did.

While he received a bonus check, any royalties or licensing deals from the film benefited Wired, not Bearman directly. The decision to pay him anything extra for the success of the derivative works rests solely with the Wired executives, underscoring how employment contracts can strip writers of control and compensation.

These aren’t isolated cases. A 2024 study by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and CREATe found that 93% of authors receive nothing from licensing deals (ALCS & CREATe, 2024).

Writers’ Bloc interviews with over 350 journalists, publishers, and stakeholders revealed that 100% of journalists must surrender all ownership rights when commissioned.

Investigative journalist Scott Carney calls this “The Contract that Kills Journalism” (Scott Carney, 2023), highlighting the problem succinctly, arguing that exploitative contracts choke creators’ livelihoods. Freelancers frequently see their work adapted into films, series, or books – yet they rarely see another penny after.

Incidentally, journalism is the only creative sector where the creator of the original work is not entitled to royalties from reproductions or derivative works from established licensing agreements.

Compare this with writing music, films, books, video-games, etc., industries which all have established mechanisms for attributing royalties to the creator of the original work.

The financial toll is brutal. In the UK, freelance journalists earn an average of just £17,500 annually (ALCS & CREATe, 2024), barely enough to survive. This precarity drives talent away from journalism, eroding the quality of information and threatening democracy itself.

Big Tech’s Shadow: A $4.8 Billion Drain

Independent publishers face a parallel crisis. Their archives—decades of carefully crafted content—are scraped by Big Tech (e.g., Google, OpenAI, all your favourites!) to train AI models or reproduce articles, often without permission or payment.

This is far more than petty theft of an article here or there; it’s a $4.8 billion pillage and plunder.

Lawsuits like the New York Times’ $3 billion claim (Harvard Law Review, 2024) and the Chicago Tribune’s $1 billion pursuit (Washington Post, 2024) expose the scale of the issue. When tech giants exploit content without licensing fees, they starve publishers of resources, devaluing journalism as a craft and undermining the concept of standards, checks and balances in reporting, in a race to scrape the entire web.

When looters smash windows to steal a TV, we are outraged. But when paywalls are breached and the libraries of content behind them ransacked for data, no one bats an eyelid. Yet we wonder why the media industry is in turmoil.

One reason is this brazen and relentless theft of copyright.

The Ripple Effect: Trust and Democracy at Stake

The consequences cascade. Newspaper revenue plummeted 62% from 2008 to 2018, according to a 2020 Pew Research report (Pew Research, 2020), slashing budgets for investigative and local reporting.

The result? A public with less reliable information in the public discourse and dwindling trust in media.

As quality journalism fades, misinformation flourishes, weakening democratic foundations from newsstands to ballot boxes.

Voices from the Field: A Universal Struggle

Our 350+ customer interviews paint a grim picture that corroborate the third-party studies and surveys: journalists from across the UK to the US to the EU face a “take-it-or-leave-it” ultimatum – sign away rights or lose the job.

Publishers decry Big Tech’s exploitation of their archives as an unpaid free-for-all.

This is more than a niche problem; it’s a global unravelling of a vital industry.

What’s Needed: A New Blueprint

The music industry fought piracy with iTunes and Spotify. Journalism needs its own revolution.

Here’s what’s required:

• Legal Mechanism: A robust system to detect copyright breaches and enforce local laws, empowering creators and publishers against Big Tech’s overreach.
• Access to Verified Content: A platform allowing Big Tech to legally license structured, verified content (e.g., articles) for AI training, benefiting both sides – like iTunes did for music.
• Cost-Effective Revenue: Affordable for tech companies, yet delivering steady, reliable income to creators and publishers.
• Ease of Use: Simple and accessible for all stakeholders.
• 21st-Century Durability: Built to endure the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

One fix is not sufficient. There is a urgent need to rebalance the ecosystem so writers are not erased from their own stories

Conclusion: A Call to Action

Ken Li and Joshuah Bearman’s experiences reveal a broken system where creators fuel billion-dollar successes but reap little reward.

Journalism nor publishing can survive this silent heist as per the status quo. What is needed is protection for authors’ rights and to ensure fair compensation through an easy-to-use mechanism.

And it’s needed now.

Learn more about this fight and join the push to save the voices that shape our world.