Piggy Banks to Paychecks: Ensuring Child Content Creators’ Protection Against Financial Exploitation by Parents and Guardians
The digital age is dangerous. Among those most at risk are child content creators, who often face financial exploitation by the hands of a parent or guardian. Although California’s recent amendments to the Coogan framework—legislation designed to protect the earnings of minors in the entertainment industry—mark a meaningful step towards protecting children, the state legislature has acknowledged that loopholes remain. These gaps include hidden costs of protection that may exclude low-income families, blur boundaries, and perpetuate developmental inequality. Moreover, the framework’s current strict set-aside baseline may limit lower-income households’ ability to compete in a heavily saturated influencer economy, while entrenching the market dominance of well-resourced creators.
This Note argues that reform must empower courts to adjudicate individual lawsuits—between children and their parents or guardians—with flexibility rather than a strict one-size-fits-all approach. A flexible approach, paired with stronger oversight of parental use of their child’s image in monetized content, would better align legislative goals with the realities of the digital age.
Author: Spencer S. Vora
Volume 27, Issue 2