Protection to profit: turning creative assets into revenue
By Lisa Agueda and Merrick Soss
When Paris Hilton trademarked "That's hot," many people treated it as a punchline. Here was a celebrity, already famous for being famous, wrapping a piece of cultural slang in legal paper. It seemed, at best, excessive. At worst, it looked like a move that only made sense if you had lawyers on retainer and nothing better to do with them.
That perception turned out to be wrong. What Hilton had grasped (and what a generation of creators, influencers, and digital brand owners are still catching up to) is that phrases, names, identities, and content libraries aren't just social currency. They're actual property that can be licensed, transferred, enforced and made to generate revenue long after the original moment of recognition has passed.
The creator economy is now large enough that this distinction matters in ways it didn't a decade ago. There are people building substantial audiences on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok who have constructed real brands: recognizable identities, content libraries, and creative assets that others want access to and that companies pay to be adjacent to. Converting those assets into registered marks is what transforms a personal brand into something with value that exists independently of your continued output, and opens up new channels, new formats, and new revenue that the original platform alone could never support.
Register, register, register
The practical bar to doing this is lower than many people assume. A trademark application runs around $350 in filing fees, not a trivial sum, but not a prohibitive one either, particularly for creators who are already generating income from their content. The sensible thing is to register before you need to, not after. The trademark office doesn't expedite applications because a deal has landed in your inbox. Filing in a hurry, after the fact, is not the same as having filed. At minimum, register what people already associate with you: your name, your handle, the tagline that brands keep asking to include in their campaigns. If something is doing commercial work for you, it deserves legal protection.
Scale your IP
Once you've built an engaged audience (maybe collected some brand deals, developed a recognizable voice) the question worth asking is what else your existing content could be doing. Syndicating to a new platform, launching a Substack, starting a podcast, writing a book, are all ways to make assets you've already built work harder across more surfaces and revenue models. A newsletter with a subscription model generates income differently than a sponsored post. A book deal reaches an audience that may never have found you on social media. The content library you've built is the foundation for all of it.
Before doing any of this, though, the agreements deserve close attention. Early creator contracts (brand partnerships, content collaborations, syndication deals) often contain ownership clauses that are broader than they appear. Derivative rights, in particular, tend to get buried: they determine what a brand can do with your creative work beyond the original scope of the deal, and they can, in the wrong formulation, hand over far more than the creator intended. These are the kinds of clauses that produce disputes when a creator later discovers that the agreement they signed, in the excitement of a first real opportunity, was more generous to the other party than they realized.
Perpetual usage rights deserve the same scrutiny. A broad, multi-platform license to your name and likeness can result in overexposure that erodes your value over time. Retaining approval over derivatives and limiting the scope and duration of usage rights aren't aggressive asks: they're standard protections that any creator entering an agreement should understand before signing. Platform terms of service carry the same weight. Syndication to a new channel or a podcast licensing arrangement both have implications for what you own and what you've given away. Treating them as administrative steps rather than negotiation is understandable, and expensive.
IP as a sword, not just a shield
What often goes unexamined is the third dimension of all this: enforcement not as defense, but as a commercial opening. The instinct when someone uses your content or your brand without permission is to shut it down. Sometimes that's the right call. But infringement also signals something: whoever copied you thought your work was worth copying. In the right circumstances,this could be the beginning of a licensing conversation rather than a legal dispute.
A direct message acknowledging the use, noting the ownership, and offering a path to legitimate access costs almost nothing and occasionally produces a revenue relationship that wouldn't have existed otherwise. If that approach doesn't land, the situation can be escalated with legal intervention. What it requires, though, is having the registered rights that make the conversation credible (and having monitoring tools in place to know the infringement is happening at all). Platforms like TikTok and Instagram require registered trademarks before they'll process takedown requests. Without registration, you're largely on your own.
The broader point is one that rights you haven't formalized are rights you can't fully use. Changing that mostly just requires deciding (early on, if possible), that what you've made is worth protecting, and acting on that decision before someone else does.
Looking to maximize your IP’s revenue potential? Contact creator and brand agreement legal expert Merrick Soss and IP expert Lisa Agueda to find out how.
