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Entertainment partner’s book explores how…

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Entertainment partner’s book explores how Black artists’ intellectual property rights have been exploited

By David Weisenfeld

September 30, 2026, 9:16 am CDT

Lisa Davis

Lisa Davis, an entertainment lawyer, is the author of “Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited—and the Fight to Retake Control,” a book published by Simon & Schuster.

Lisa E. Davis, a Black lawyer and a partner who chairs the entertainment group at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in New York, has represented artists including documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson and actor Wendell Pierce.

She’s also the author of Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited—and the Fight to Retake Control, a book published by Simon & Schuster that details the stories of Black artists and inventors whose names have been mostly lost to history and also explores the path that major Black stars took to break through a host of barriers in music, movies, television and more.

The ABA Journal spoke with Davis about her new book and what readers can learn from it.

A big theme in your book is how Black women in particular had their intellectual property rights exploited, from Billie Holiday to others who made a fraction of what they could have earned. How important was it to tell their stories?

Very important because we are in an era right now where people are actively trying to erase Black history, and they are aggressively trying to claim that Black people didn’t contribute anything intellectually and creatively to this country. So that was a very important goal in writing the book, and, of course, when you combine racism and sexism, you have people particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, these were all seminal artists, incredibly important, who were all taken horrific advantage of by, frankly, Black men and white men—not just racism but sexism was in play.

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What surprised you the most from an IP standpoint with this project?

I wouldn’t say anything surprised me because the patterns I detailed were part of the reason that I was motivated to become an entertainment lawyer; because you frequently heard stories of artists that, at one point, were very successful and then they ended up impoverished. Some of that could have been about lifestyle choices they made, maybe they had substance abuse issues or other things, but often, it was because they were just stolen from. What surprised me was actually the success stories, like Vee-Jay Records. I had no idea that the Four Seasons and the Beatles first label in the United States was a Black-owned label. The story of somebody starting out being a DJ and then saying, “Hey, I can start a record label.” That’s an incredible story, and that it was a Black woman and her husband, that was a chapter of modern rock ’n’ roll history that I certainly didn’t know.

Shifting to movies, you wrote that Spike Lee and other filmmakers may not have broken through if they hadn’t gone independent from the Hollywood studios. Was that something that shone through to you in writing this?

Certainly, they wouldn’t have been able to tell the stories they wanted to tell because every studio says, “We know how to sell motion pictures. We know what sells. We know what the audience wants. We do market research. We are longtime producers and distributors. So we know best.” By making a film independently and showing there was an audience, then you get around that process, and that’s what those pioneering independent filmmakers, Spike and Robert Townsend and others, did. And, of course, with success, all the studios suddenly were paying attention and wanted to make more films like that because they said, “Hey, there’s an audience here. We don’t necessarily know how to reach it, but we will try to find filmmakers who can reach it for us.”

Napster was driven out of business for what many viewed as widespread copyright infringement. You address that in the book but called it a “Pyrrhic victory for music labels and artists.” Why?

The reason I said it was a Pyrrhic victory is because instead of embracing the change in technology, by fighting it, what happened to the labels is there were a million other Napster-like services, and it was like whack-a-mole. They couldn’t possibly get rid of them all. So the revenue for the music labels went down dramatically. Now, it has rebounded because they all have participation in Spotify’s revenue. So the labels do quite well. But for artists now, that music is streaming, rather than being sold in physical copies and physical units. They’re making a fraction of what they used to make.

AI is dominating the news these days. As an entertainment lawyer, what concerns you the most with AI, and what it could mean for IP rights.

It concerns me from multiple angles. First of all, the process of generative AI being trained requires inputs of copyrighted material for which people are not being adequately compensated. That’s why there are lawsuits all over the place because they’re training these large language models and these AI engines on material that they have not licensed and paid for. For example, you say I’m going to train my [large language model] on all the novels of Stephen King, and then a publisher says, “OK, I’m going to have a thriller that was created by AI, and it’s going to be in the style of Stephen King, but it’s not written by Stephen King.” And there’s no requirement to pay royalties because it’s created by an AI engine. That’s obviously not good for authors. The flip side of it is that, as of now, the courts have said consistently that works created by AI aren’t copyrightable because you require human creation for something to be copyrightable. So it’s not really a good business model unless the law changes, which I would hope it would not.

Is there any message you would like to leave with your readers?

It’ll be an engaging read for both lawyers and nonlawyers. The technology we are confronting right now is new, but we’ve had technological advances across history that have impacted how people listen to music, see films. Part of what I tried to do in profiling the people I did was to say, “Here are different approaches.” It was a different time. It was different technology. But the issues were the same in terms of creative people trying to get paid, Black people trying to have our authorship recognized, and being paid what we’re worth. Those are evergreen issues.