The Rick Beato Debate: A Signal for the Future of Intellectual Property
By: George Karalexis & Donna Budica
At its core, Ten2 Media is a rights management company. One of the most important responsibilities our clients trust us with is protecting and enforcing their IP rights. But in today’s digital landscape, that responsibility isn’t black and white. As UGC becomes one of the most powerful drivers of music discovery and exposure, we have to constantly rethink how we approach enforcement. The challenge is making sure we’re defending value while also enabling “value-add” creators — people whose work expands awareness, builds community, and ultimately strengthens the catalog we’re here to protect.
The recent clash between Universal Music Group (UMG) and YouTube creator Rick Beato is a perfect example. It highlights how intellectual property frameworks, built for a physical world, are colliding with a digital ecosystem defined by platform ubiquity, creator empowerment, and cultural liquidity. As founders of Ten2 Media, we see both sides clearly: rights holders must safeguard the value of IP, while creators are contributing new forms of cultural value. The issue is that current systems and laws aren’t designed to balance these priorities.
The Rights Holder’s Imperative
Rights holders like UMG are responsible for safeguarding artists’ work and protecting revenue streams. Automated enforcement tools have become essential in a world with billions of uploads annually. At the same time, rights holders are hiring influencers to generate content and hope for virality. While this can drive engagement, it does not replace the value of creators who organically produce additive content.
Mandate: Rights holders act as stewards of creativity, ensuring that artists are compensated and that unauthorized uses do not erode long-term value.
Tools: Automated enforcement such as YouTube’s Content ID is a rational response to scale. Manual review is impossible at billions of uploads per year.
Risk of inaction: Without enforcement, piracy and unlicensed exploitation could proliferate, undermining both revenue and artist trust.
The Creator’s Reality
Creators such as Rick Beato represent a new category in the ecosystem. Their work is additive, not substitutional, often reviving interest in legacy catalogues and fostering music literacy. Current enforcement systems fail to differentiate between truly infringing content and educational or transformative work, creating unnecessary friction.
New role: Creators serve as educators, critics, and cultural translators whose work adds value to the original content.
Contribution: They expand awareness, foster music literacy, and often revive catalog interest. In practice, they act as marketing partners, not competitors.
Tension: Current systems treat all unlicensed use equally, whether a bootleg upload or a transformative educational video. The nuance is lost.
The Structural Tension: Law vs. Culture
Copyright frameworks were written for a pre-digital world and struggle to accommodate today’s content ecosystem. Platforms are global, content is instantly remixable, and the pace of cultural consumption far exceeds the capabilities of enforcement tools. Legal structures such as the DMCA cannot capture the nuanced contributions of transformative creators.
Outdated frameworks: The DMCA, enacted in 1998, predates YouTube, TikTok, and AI music. Its binary framing of infringement versus non-infringement does not reflect today’s complexity.
Cultural liquidity: Content in 2025 is global, remixable, and instantly distributable. Enforcement systems designed for fixed works cannot keep pace.
Personal Quote: “IP must protect value, not stifle it. The challenge is that value creation today takes forms the law never imagined.”
A More Adaptive IP Architecture
The future of intellectual property requires balancing protection with participation. Rights holders must rethink enforcement and economic models while treating transformative creators as collaborators. This approach recognizes the value of organic content that is not prompted or commissioned yet drives awareness and engagement.
Smarter enforcement systems: Distinguish piracy from education, critique, or transformative use. Introduce thresholds or trusted creator designations for proven non-infringing actors.
New economic models: Explore shared monetization between rights holders and transformative creators. Treat analysis, education, and critique as value-generating touchpoints, not leakages.
Cultural partnerships: Reframe creators as allies in cultural longevity. Build collaboration frameworks where rights holders and creators expand, rather than restrict, cultural relevance — there are many companies and third-party companies doing this but it needs to be a universally adopted ethos.
Implications for the Industry
Rights holders, creators, and platforms are all navigating this new landscape. Enforcement alone is not enough; reputational awareness and nuanced collaboration are equally critical. Platforms have the opportunity to mediate between rights holders and creators, fostering innovation while protecting value.
For rights holders: Enforcement must remain rigorous but reputation-aware. Blunt takedowns risk alienating communities and diminishing goodwill.
For creators: Advocacy for fair use will intensify. Creators must also recognize that rights holders are defending artist livelihoods, not simply restricting creativity.
For platforms: The greatest opportunity lies in mediating the middle ground, developing smarter tools that reduce conflict while enabling revenue for all stakeholders.
The UMG–Rick Beato debate is not about winners or losers. It is a signal of a larger shift: intellectual property is moving from a defensive tool to a collaborative framework. Ownership remains central, but its function must adapt to an era defined by platform ubiquity, creator empowerment, and cultural fluidity. This is something we think about on a daily basis as we continue to update and iterate our position on how we approach rights management.
“The future of IP is not enforcement alone. It is enforcement plus enablement—protecting value while amplifying creativity.”
