Stolen By Contract

The legal robbery of authors, musicians, and creators

von Onesimus Malatji

240 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

For decades, creators were told the same story: sign the contract, trust the process, wait your turn. Then the turn never came. Stolen By Contract: the legal robbery of authors, musicians, and creators is a raw, unfiltered examination of how creative work is systematically stripped from its owners through opaque policies, vague "low-content" labels, predatory contracts, and silence-by-design. This is not a book about piracy. It is about legal theft.

It explores how books can be removed from distribution while still generating revenue, how royalties vanish without transparency, and how creators are gaslit into believing the loss is their fault. It tells the psychological story too-the trauma of watching your work succeed while you stay broke, the emotional crash after ten hours in a studio only to hear your sound elsewhere, owned by someone else.

The book also confronts the uncomfortable truth: new technologies-especially ai-are not the enemy of creators. They are the enemy of systems built on gatekeeping, opacity, and extraction. Ai didn't invent exploitation; it exposed it. And that exposure is why old publishing and production models are panicking. Part investigation, part survival guide, and part manifesto, stolen by contract gives language to experiences millions of creators live through but are afraid to name. It shows how the system works, why speaking out feels dangerous, and how creators can protect their work, their income, and their sanity in a rapidly shifting creative economy.This book is for anyone who ever created something valuable-and watched someone else profit from it.