The Asset That Had No Owner.
Eighteen years ago, a law review article diagnosed the failure with precision: American copyright was never built to hold Black cultural production. The diagnosis was correct. The remedy it proposed never came. So we built one.
An industry that preaches ownership.
Professor K.J. Greene opened with an irony too sharp to ignore. The same recording industry that built campaigns telling teenagers that copying equals theft had spent a century taking the work of Black artists without credit, without royalties, without consent.
Greene called the campaign a fight to inculcate copynorms — a cultural shift in how society regards copying. The industry insisted that no one wants their property taken and distributed without permission. The argument is sound. It is also an indictment of the people making it.
For generations, Black artists as a class were denied the fruits of intellectual property protection. Blues, ragtime, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, hip-hop — every original American musical form was created in Black communities and monetized, disproportionately, by others. This was not a series of accidents. It was a system: contract law and copyright law operating together against a backdrop of racial subordination.
The point of this note is not to relitigate that history. Greene already documented it, exhaustively and well. The point is what comes after the diagnosis — and why, eighteen years later, the cure he sketched still has not been built.
The law could not hold the work.
Bias alone does not explain the loss. Greene's deeper argument is structural: copyright's own load-bearing doctrines were built around a model of authorship that Black cultural production did not fit. The most innovative creators were written out by design, not malice.
Read together, these are not bugs. They are the architecture. Greene's conclusion lands with force: the structure of copyright, grafted onto pervasive discrimination, dedicated Black innovation into the public domain — making the most foundational work the hardest to own.
The court's opening line treated Bessie Smith's earnings as a reason she had no standing to complain. The Empress of the Blues, sold by the millions — and the law's instinct was that she had already been paid enough.
Gee v. CBS, 1979 — the paradigm of judicial indifferenceThe remedy that never arrived.
Greene's proposed cure was a reparations framework: a levy on internet music sales, a levy on works enriched by the Copyright Term Extension Act, and an atonement model — apology first, then redress — to repair a documented harm and, not incidentally, to make the industry's copynorms credible.
It was a serious proposal. It was also bound to the very system that produced the harm. The Bessie Smith suit had already shown the trap: statutes of limitations, the death of civil-rights claims with the claimant, adverse possession asserted over a dead woman's masters. Greene quoted the line that haunts the whole effort — that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.
Eighteen years on, no levy exists. No atonement fund was established. The diagnosis was filed, cited, and shelved. The reason is not that Greene was wrong. The reason is that a backward-looking claim, routed through hostile courts and an indifferent legislature, was always going to be outrun by time.
So we stopped waiting for the master's tools. If the existing regime cannot recognize culture as property, the answer is not to petition it harder. The answer is to build the recognition the law refused to grant.
Greene asked the courts to repair the past. MADE CX builds the infrastructure that governs the future — so the loss he documented cannot recur.
From diagnosis to standardProperty rights, made formal.
The Cultural Property Rights Standard (CPRS) is a commerce standard for how cultural assets are identified, attributed, licensed, and traded. It does, by design, the four things copyright could not do for Black cultural production — and it does them at the level of infrastructure, not litigation.
Where the idea–expression line erased style, BCID names it. Where fixation excluded the oral and improvisational, the ledger records it. Where minimal originality rewarded the imitator, CUL prices the source. Where the law offered no attribution, custody restores it. The failures Greene catalogued become, one by one, the specification.
Culture is an asset class.
Greene's closing claim was that the single most glaring inequity in music is that Black artistry created the value while others profited from it. State the inequity in financial terms and the conclusion is unavoidable: an asset was being produced, traded, and capitalized — by everyone except the people who made it — precisely because it was never recognized as an asset in the first place.
Recognition is the whole project. Once cultural production is identified, attributed, licensed, and recorded, it behaves like what it has always been: property, with originators, terms, and a market.
Greene invoked Derrick Bell's interest convergence — the idea that redress advances when it also serves the broader interest. A recognized asset class converges interests by construction. Originators gain compensation and control. Licensees gain clean provenance and defensible rights. The market gains a standard. No one has to lose for culture to finally be owned by the people who make it.
The master's tools could not dismantle the master's house. They were never meant to. So we did not borrow them. We drew a new standard — and built the house.
Cultural Property Rights Standard
Read what copyright refused to protect.
The full Cultural Property Rights Standard — BCID, CUL, the Public Ledger, and Custodian Services — is published and growing across the Culture Economy Series.