Unlocking the $80 Trillion Creative Asset Class: SY Lee’s Plan to Fix the Broken IP Economy

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Seung Yoon Lee to discuss the $80 trillion creative asset class, why creators are shut out of the value they generate, and how Story Protocol aims to tokenise and “programme” intellectual property so anyone can legally remix it while paying royalties automatically.

Fixing Creator Economics

Seung’s path to this problem began with a long apprenticeship in media economics. Fresh out of Oxford, he tried to fix journalism’s broken ad model with subscriptions and crowdfunding. The idea was sound, but the timing was early. His next act, Radish Fiction, nailed a mobile-first format: serialised storytelling with micro-payments. After seven years of grinding, Radish scaled to millions in revenue and was acquired by Kakao for $440 million. 

Instead of vacationing, and retiring early, the exit clarified the bigger structural issue he could now try to tackle: creators build the culture, platforms take the economics.

For instance, think of Squid Game. The series brought Netflix billions in lifetime value through subscriptions and cultural dominance, while the original writer earned a tiny fraction of that impact. The pattern repeats across film, music, games, brands, and patents. 

Layer in the rise of AI, and the stakes grow. Large models feed on human-made data and styles. Remix culture bursts into the open, yet the rights owners are rarely included in the value chain. As Seung puts it, humans have always created through remix; the new difference is that “with the magic wand of AI tools”, anyone can produce studio-grade derivatives. The question is whether that future can be made legal, liquid, and fair.

Programming IP: From Red Tape to Click-to-License

Story Protocol is Seung’s answer. It works on two fronts. First, tokenising IP so ownership can trade and finance like other assets. Second, programming IP so usage terms are machine-readable and enforceable, with royalties routed on chain. Tokenisation tackles liquidity and access. Programming tackles permission and payment.

On the token side, Seung points to music as a clear early win. Catalogues from Justin Bieber to BTS already behave like real estate with yield, since each stream brings in dividends. Funds like KKR and Blackstone have snapped up rights because the income is predictable and global streaming still has room to run in places like India and Africa. 

Through applications building on Story, investors can acquire slices of these rights and receive yields plus upside exposure via tokens. In Seung’s framing, owning a great song can be “like owning Manhattan real estate,” only the tenants are global listeners. The broader point is that IP is not a niche. The World Intellectual Property Organization counts a multi-trillion-dollar market across characters, music, brands, patents, and increasingly the data that powers AI. 

Paying Creators, and the People Who Power AI

Then comes the harder part: usage. Today, licensing a character for a game or a dataset for model training means agents, lawyers, and months of back-and-forth. It is opaque, slow, and expensive. Story wants to collapse that into a QR-scannable set of licence terms anchored in copyright law. Put simply, IP becomes a Lego piece with rules attached. People, apps, or AIs can read the terms, create derivatives, publish, and pay the correct owners automatically through smart contracts. Seung imagines an “IP Lego land” within a few years, where creators and developers click together voices, characters, worlds, and styles to produce films, games, and songs, while original rights holders see revenue flows without hassle or legal battles.

This vision extends to real-world data, not just characters and songs. Training a robot to hold a coffee cup requires thousands of egocentric video clips in varied conditions. Traditional data-labelling methods struggle to scale that ethically and quickly. 

Story’s approach invites people to upload voice, video, and other datasets with clear on-chain terms, then get paid when companies license that data for model training. A recent text-to-speech push drew hundreds of thousands of contributors and millions of submissions in weeks. The economic loop is the point: if the internet will be rebuilt for AI, contributors should be able to opt in and share in the proceeds.

Liquidity, Adoption, and Revenue

Seung is clear-eyed about what must still be solved. First, market design. Crypto investors are used to 100x rockets, but IP behaves more like infrastructure with steady cash yields. Building the right liquidity, expectations, and trading venues for yield-bearing IP will take time. 

Second, adoption by rights owners. Many holders are protective and will need to see that open, programmable licensing grows their pie. Seung’s pitch is practical: people will remix your work anyway; make it legal, easy, and revenue-sharing by default. Third, quality for AI data. The collection engine has been proven to work. The priority now is proving sustained demand from model builders for high-grade, well-labelled sets.

On the chain economics, Seung accepts the criticism that Story’s protocol revenue is small today relative to its token valuation. He frames this as an intentional stage choice since consumer apps require very low fees. In the near term, he optimises for developer traction and transaction volume, not extraction. The test he sets is whether apps and IPs on Story can make real money. If they do, builders come, and the protocol’s economics can mature.

The Founder Temperament: Optimism for Decades, Pessimism for Days

The entrepreneurial thread running through the conversation is a study in temperament. Seung shares a cautionary chapter from Radish when a promised cheque never arrived. Headcount and spend had already banked on the cheque and in its absence, the runway collapsed to a month. 

He recalled having to survive on twenty small convertible notes just to keep the lights on until a proper round closed. The lesson he now tells younger founders is simple and hard: “Until it hits the bank, it’s not money.” Pair that with his philosophy on mindset: be “long-term overly optimistic,” but “short-term extremely pessimistic.” Believe you will win in ten years. Plan as if everything could break in ten days.

That mix of idealism and realism also explains the “fire in the belly” after a life-changing exit. The high, he says, is not the balance in your bank account, but the moment the thing works. The work is the reward. Money secures time, but creating impact is the only way to feel alive.

Why It Matters

The promise of Story Protocol is to move culture and data from closed stacks into open systems, where ownership, attribution, and pay-outs are embedded from the start. 

If it works, creators will raise directly from fans, license to platforms on their own terms, and see remixing turn from piracy to participation. Model builders will pay fairly for the fuel that makes their systems useful. And the rest of us will live in a world where clicking together IP is normal and legal.

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