How UK Copyright Law Erases the Creators Who Build Books

David Salariya
2 hours ago
19 min read

A Plea for Legislative Reform of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The Gap in the UK Copyright Law

There is a gap at the heart of UK copyright law, it is not an obscure technicality, it is a structural failure - one that has silently allowed decades of creative work to be stripped of attribution, absorbed into corporate catalogues, and presented to the public as if it emerged, fully formed, from institutions that had no hand in its creation.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) was drafted in a time before desktop publishing, before the consolidation of the Big Five publishers and before the widespread use of book packagers as the de facto architects of entire publishing series. It was built around a familiar model: a named author writes a text; a publisher prints and sells it. That model was always incomplete. In 2025, it is inadequate.

This is a plea, grounded in documented history, analysis, and the lived experience of those affected - for reform. Specifically it calls for the extension of moral rights under the CDPA to cover designers, concept creators, format architects, and book packagers: the people who build the systems within which books are made, but who have no legal protection when those systems are taken over, rebranded, and presented as someone else’s founding idea.

What Book Packagers Actually Do: A History Hiding in Plain Sight

The Origins of Book Packaging

Book packaging, the practice of an independent company or individual conceiving, designing, commissioning and delivering a complete book or series to a publisher, is not new. Its roots reach back to the early 20th century, Edward Stratemeyer, who created the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins through his Stratemeyer Syndicate, was among its earliest practitioners: he hired ghostwriters at flat fees, published under pseudonyms, and retained intellectual property rights over the series architectures he had built, the books became cultural institutions, the names of the people who wrote most of them did not.

In the United Kingdom, book packaging grew significantly from the 1970s onwards, driven by the rise of highly illustrated, co-edition formats, books designed simultaneously for multiple national markets, often sold as camera-ready files or finished print-ready products. Publishers like Franklin Watts and Simon & Schuster worked extensively with independent packagers who delivered complete books, designed and ready for the warehouse, these were not peripheral contributors, they were, in the words of one former packager, “publishers in all but name - just without the imprint.”

The industry that grew around this model was substantial, companies like Bender Richardson White have produced over 1,400 titles during three decades. Packagers routinely handled writing proposals, commissioning authors, editing manuscripts, acquiring images, designing books, copyediting, proofreading, indexing, and overseeing prepress and printing, in many cases, they delivered finished books straight to the publisher’s warehouse, the publisher’s role, in such arrangements, was frequently limited to sales, marketing and distribution.

The Flat Fee Culture and Its Consequences

Central to the packager model was a financial structure that, in retrospect, embedded invisibility into the economics of publishing. Writers, designers, and other contributors were engaged on flat fees - a fixed payment upon delivery, with no royalty participation, no ongoing financial relationship with the work, and in many cases, no credit on the finished book, this was not accidental, it was the commercial logic of a system optimised for speed, cost control and scale.

The flat fee model created a class of creators who were essential to the existence of the work but structurally absent from its history. A ghostwriter whose novel became a bestseller received no additional payment, a designer who originated a series format that sold millions of copies across twenty years received nothing when that format was acquired by a larger publisher and continued. The intellectual property, the concept, the visual system, the editorial architecture, had been purchased outright, usually for a sum that reflected the commercial uncertainty of the moment rather than the eventual value of what had been created.

This was, and remains, standard industry practice, but standard practice and just practice are not the same thing.

II. The Legal Gap: What the CDPA Does and Does Not Protect

What the Law Covers

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides protection for literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works. It grants moral rights to authors and directors: the right to be identified as the creator of a work (the “paternity right” under sections 77–79); the right to object to derogatory treatment of a work (the “integrity right” under sections 80–83); the right to object to false attribution (section 84); and a right of privacy in certain photographs and films (section 85).

These were significant advances when the Act came into force on 1 August 1989. The UK had previously offered authors little statutory protection for their moral claims, a reflection of what legal scholars have described as the British legal system’s traditional scepticism towards the idea that authors deserve special protection in law. Even the introduction of the paternity right was qualified: it must be formally asserted before it applies, and it contains numerous exceptions.

The Critical Gap: What the Law Excludes

Moral rights under the CDPA apply to authors and directors, they do not apply to designers, they do not apply to concept creators. They do not apply to format architects and do not apply to the people who build the intellectual and visual systems within which a book series operates, even if those systems represent decades of creative labour and generate millions of pounds of commercial value.

The practical consequence of this gap is significant, when a book series is sold or transferred as routinely happens during the wave of publisher acquisitions and consolidations that has characterised the industry since the 1980s, the designer who originated its format, the creative director who built its visual language, the packager who assembled the team and delivered the finished product have no legal right to attribution. They cannot assert the right to be identified and cannot object to the presentation of their work as the organic creation of the acquiring institution, they cannot prevent their contribution from being quietly written out of the history of what they made.

The CDPA also contains a significant weakness in the waivability of moral rights. Unlike French law, which treats moral rights as inalienable and perpetual, or German law which gives moral and economic rights equal weighting, UK moral rights can be waived by written instrument. In practice, standard publishing contracts frequently contain waiver clauses, often buried within boilerplate language, which effectively extinguish the moral rights of authors before they have been asserted. For those creators who fall outside the Act’s definition of “author” entirely, there is nothing to waive - because there is nothing to protect in the first place.

The IP Transfer Problem

The problem becomes acute when intellectual property is transferred between publishers, under UK law, when a publishing house acquires the IP of a series or catalogue, they acquire the economic rights to the work, they do not acquire any obligation to maintain, acknowledge or communicate the creative history of what they have purchased. The front matter of a book may change, the “First published by” line may be altered or omitted, the original packager’s name, if it was ever present, may disappear entirely.

In the digital age, this is not merely a matter of omission, it becomes, in effect, a rewriting of the public record. When a global publisher presents an acquired series as the organic product of its own creative culture - as “the start of an idea”, in the language of marketing and when that presentation is amplified through catalogue copy, press releases and promotional material, the false account becomes the official one, It is indexed. repeated accumulating authority simply through repetition.

The original creator has no legal recourse, they have, under the current framework, no right to correct the record.

III. The Scale of Consolidation and the Erasure It Enables

To understand why this matters at a systemic level, it is necessary to appreciate the scale of publisher consolidation that has taken place in the UK over the past four decades. The UK publishing landscape of the 1970s consisted of numerous independent, often family-run houses: Collins, Faber, Allen & Unwin, Hodder & Stoughton and many others operated as standalone entities with distinct editorial cultures.

By the late 1980s, what The New York Times had identified as “merger fever” in publishing as far back as 1977 had accelerated dramatically. Today the UK market is dominated by five major international conglomerates: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. Each of these entities is the product of numerous mergers and acquisitions, each of which transferred catalogue rights, and with them, the creative histories of the works involved, between corporate owners with no legal obligation to acknowledge, or even to know, how those works came to exist.

Each acquisition is a potential erasure event, the smaller the original creator, the more likely their contribution is to disappear entirely. A packager who delivered a complete series to a mid-sized UK publisher in 1990 may find, thirty years later, that the series is now owned by a global conglomerate, actively marketed as the conglomerate’s own creative property, with no acknowledgement of the independent company that conceived it, designed it, commissioned it and built it from nothing.

This is not a hypothetical scenario, it is a structural consequence of the combination of the flat fee culture, the IP transfer mechanism, and the absence of moral rights for designers and concept creators under the CDPA.

IV. Why “Just Move On” Is Not an Adequate Response

Those affected by these practices are sometimes advised, explicitly or implicitly, that the appropriate response is to accept what happened and create new work. This advice, however well-intentioned, misunderstands the nature of what has been taken.

The loss of attribution for a creative person is not merely sentimental. It is professional and reputational. A body of work is a portfolio, it is the evidence upon which future commissions are won, upon which professional standing is built, upon which a career is evaluated. When a global company presents work that took thirty years to develop as the product of its own founding vision, the original creator does not simply lose credit for the past, they lose the ability to demonstrate their professional history to future collaborators, commissioners and clients.

There is also a cultural loss that extends beyond the individual. Publishing’s understanding of itself depends on accurate accounts of how books are made. When the creative process is flattened, when books appear to emerge fully formed from large institutions rather than from the minds and labour of specific people working in specific contexts, the industry loses its ability to learn from its own history. Innovation in publishing depends on being able to trace how formats evolved, how ideas moved from concept to product, how the collaborative systems that produced successful work were assembled. Strip away the attribution and you strip away the knowledge.

V. What Reform Would Look Like: Specific Legislative Proposals

Reform of the CDPA in this area does not require a fundamental reimagining of UK copyright law, it requires targeted, proportionate amendments that address the specific gaps identified above.

The following proposals are offered as a framework for legislative discussion.

Proposal 1: Extension of Moral Rights to Designers and Concept Creators

Section 77 of the CDPA should be amended to extend the right of attribution to designers and concept creators whose intellectual contribution to a work is original and identifiable. The test should draw on existing CDPA principles, whether the work exhibits a degree of labour, skill or judgement, and should apply to the creator of a series format, visual system or editorial architecture in the same way it applies to the author of a literary text.

The film industry offers a useful analogy. The CDPA already recognises the director of a film as entitled to moral rights, alongside the screenplay’s author. A book series that is designed, conceived, editorially structured and delivered by an independent creative company is no less collaborative than a film, and no less deserving of recognition for its multiple architects.

Proposal 2: Provenance Disclosure Obligations on IP Transfer

Where intellectual property in a book series or catalogue is transferred between publishers, the acquiring party should be under a statutory obligation to maintain accurate records of the work’s creative provenance and, where those records exist, to acknowledge them in any public presentation of the work. This need not require the acquiring publisher to feature original creators prominently in marketing. It should require, at minimum, that a factually accurate account of the work’s origin is preserved in official records and available upon reasonable request.

Proposal 3: Limits on Moral Rights Waiver in Standard Contracts

The current position, under which moral rights can be waived by written instrument, and under which standard publishing contracts routinely contain such waivers, creates an environment in which moral rights exist in theory but are routinely extinguished in practice. This should be addressed by limiting the enforceability of blanket moral rights waivers in standard-form publishing contracts, particularly those entered into by individual creators without independent legal representation. Waiver should require specific, informed consent to specific, identified acts, not a general surrender of all moral rights in all circumstances.

Proposal 4: A Register of Creative Provenance

The UK Intellectual Property Office should consider establishing, or endorsing the establishment of, a voluntary register of creative provenance for published works, analogous to existing trademark and design registration systems. Creators and packagers who originated significant works or series could register their contribution, creating a publicly accessible record that would survive the transfer of IP and the passage of time. Registration would not be a precondition of rights; it would be a mechanism for evidence.

VI. Objections Considered

“This would create uncertainty in IP transactions”

The concern that extended attribution obligations would complicate publisher acquisitions deserves to be taken seriously. IP transactions in publishing are commercially significant and legally complex. However, the proposed reforms do not seek to alter the economic rights that transfer in such transactions. They seek only to preserve the historical record of creative contribution. The administrative burden of maintaining accurate provenance records is modest compared to the existing obligations that publishers already manage in relation to rights, permissions and copyright duration.

Flat fee contracts were freely entered into

It is true that the flat fee arrangements that characterised much of the packaging industry were contractual choices, made by parties with at least formal freedom to negotiate otherwise. But freedom of contract is not a sufficient response to structural inequality. The publishing industry has historically operated with significant power imbalances between large publishers and small independent packagers. The flat fee culture was not a neutral market outcome; it was the product of a system in which the terms were, in practice, dictated by those with the greater bargaining power. Moreover, the proposal here is not to reopen historical contracts. It is to prevent the same dynamic from operating unchecked in the future.

The law already covers this through design right

The CDPA does create an unregistered design right for original designs, but design right is an economic right, not a moral right. It does not protect attribution. It does not prevent a publisher from presenting acquired work as self-originated. It does not give the creator of a series format the right to be identified, the right to object to derogatory treatment, or any mechanism to correct a false public account of the work’s provenance. The gap this document addresses is in moral rights, not economic rights.

VI. Artificial Intelligence and the Permanent Erasure Problem

The arguments made in the preceding sections have force on their own terms, the erasure of designers and concept creators from their own work’s history is wrong in analogue publishing. But there is a further dimension that elevates this from a matter of historical justice to one of urgent legislative necessity: the industrialisation of the false record by artificial intelligence.

How AI Systems Inherit and Amplify Attribution Gaps

Artificial intelligence systems - including the large language models now being deployed across every sector of the creative economy - are trained on the publicly available record. They learn from catalogues, marketing copy, Wikipedia entries, press releases, publisher websites, and digitised archives. They learn, in other words, from precisely the sources most likely to reflect the acquirer’s account of a series’ origin rather than the documented reality of how it was made.

The consequence is structurally distinct from anything the CDPA’s drafters could have anticipated in 1988. When a publisher presents an acquired series as its own founding creation, that claim does not merely appear in a catalogue that fades from use. It enters the training data of AI systems that will reproduce it - with the authority of apparent consensus, at global scale, indefinitely. Every subsequent AI-generated summary, biography, or publishing history that draws on that data will propagate the false account further. The original creator’s erasure does not simply survive into the digital age. It compounds.

There is no corrective mechanism. An AI system asked to describe the origins of a well-known children’s non-fiction series will not consult the original packager’s business records or interview the designer who conceived its visual language. It will draw on what has been indexed and repeated. If the indexed and repeated account is wrong, the AI’s answer will be wrong - and that answer will be cited, shared, and used as the basis for further research, further content, and further decisions, each one moving further from the truth.

The Live Legislative Moment

This document is submitted at a moment of unusual legislative opportunity. The UK government ran a major consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence between December 2024 and February 2025, receiving over 11,500 responses. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 required the government to publish both an economic impact assessment and a report on the use of copyright works in AI development by March 2026. That report has now been published.

The report’s central conclusion is significant: the government has stepped back from its previously preferred option of a broad text and data mining exception with opt-out, acknowledging the creative industries’ concerns that such an approach would allow AI systems to train on copyrighted works without compensation or meaningful consent. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, in its own March 2026 report, recommended a licensing-first approach and called on the government to rule out the opt-out model entirely.

This debate has, so far, focused almost entirely on the economic rights of creators whose work is used to train AI. That is a legitimate and important concern, but there is a second AI and copyright problem that has received almost no attention in the consultation process: what happens when AI systems are trained on a false public record, and that false record concerns the

very attribution and provenance of creative work?

The four expert technical working groups established by the government - covering Control and Technical Standards, Information and Transparency, Licensing, and Wider Support for Creatives- are exploring transparency requirements, training data disclosure, and creator control mechanisms. These are the right conversations. But they cannot be fully effective if the underlying public record from which AI systems learn is already compromised by decades of attribution erasure. Transparency about what AI was trained on does not help if what it was trained on was wrong in the first place.

Section 9(3) and the Computer-Generated Works Problem

There is also a specific legal dimension to the AI attribution problem that the reform proposals in this document directly address. Section 9(3) of the CDPA, which provides that for computer-generated works, the author is the person who made the arrangements necessary for their creation, is now under renewed scrutiny because of AI. The government’s March 2026 report recommends removing protection for purely computer-generated works under this section entirely.

This creates a further risk for uncredited human creators, if AI systems begin generating content in the style of book series whose original architects were never legally acknowledged, because they fell outside the CDPA’s definition of “author” as designers and concept creators, those architects have no standing under the current framework to assert any claim. They cannot object. They cannot be identified. They have no legal personality in relation to the work. The AI-generated derivative sits in a legal landscape in which the human original was never recognised.

Why Attribution Reform Is AI Policy

The proposals set out in Section V of this document, extending moral rights to designers and concept creators, requiring provenance disclosure on IP transfer, limiting blanket moral rights waivers, and establishing a register of creative provenance, are not only copyright reforms. In the context of AI, they are data integrity measures.

If the public record accurately reflects who made what, AI systems trained on that record will propagate accurate information. If creators are legally entitled to be identified, and if IP transfers require accurate provenance disclosure, then the record that AI systems inherit will be more honest. The reform of attribution law is, in the age of AI, a precondition for maintaining any reliable account of how creative work in this country was actually produced.

Every year that passes without reform is another year of training data that embeds the false account more deeply, the window for correction narrows, creative history, once it has been absorbed into the weights of a sufficiently large AI system and propagated across a sufficient number of derivative sources, becomes extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. The legal framework that allows this to happen through its silence on the attribution rights of designers and concept creators bears direct responsibility for what follows.

The government has, admirably, chosen not to rush its AI copyright reforms in the face of pressure from the technology industry. It has recognised that the creative industries’ concerns are legitimate and that the evidence base requires further development. This document asks only that the same care and deliberation be extended to the attribution problem, and that the connection between attribution law, the integrity of the public record, and the reliability of AI-generated information be recognised as part of the same reform agenda, not a separate and smaller concern.

VII. The Diversity Contradiction: Doublethink at the Heart of Modern Publishing

There is a word for holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, and acting on both with equal sincerity. George Orwell called it doublethink. It is the appropriate term for what the publishing industry is currently doing in relation to diversity and attribution.

The industry’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is now structural and public. Major publishers produce annual inclusion reports, they maintain dedicated imprints for underrepresented voices, run mentorship schemes, set acquisition targets, make public pledges and submit to external audits. At every level of public-facing communication, the message is consistent: who made this matters. Visibility matters. The historical exclusion of certain voices, backgrounds and perspectives is an injustice that the industry is actively working to correct.

And yet, operating through the same organisations, often in the same financial year, the legal, contractual and cataloguing processes described in this document do the precise opposite. They remove names, erase creative histories. They replace the complex, often diverse reality of how books were built with a clean institutional narrative in which a global corporation is the originating intelligence. The left hand champions visibility. The right hand systematically destroys it, neither hand appears to know what the other is doing.

The Access Dimension the Industry Does Not Discuss

The book packaging and independent producer model was, for several decades, one of the more genuinely accessible routes into publishing for people who lacked the social capital that conventional entry required. The London connections, the right university. The unpaid internship in a Soho office, the family friend who knew an editor. These were, and in many respects remain, the invisible prerequisites of a career in traditional publishing.

Independent creative companies operated differently, they were built on skill, on the ability to conceive a format that would sell, on the willingness to take commercial risk outside the safety of an institutional salary. They operated in cities and regions beyond London. They were founded by people from a wider range of backgrounds than the conventional publishing house of the same era. The work they produced, particularly in children’s non-fiction, illustrated reference and educational series, reached millions of readers precisely because it was made by people who understood audiences that the metropolitan

literary establishment did not always reach.

When the IP created by those companies is acquired by global conglomerates and their creative origins are erased, what is being concentrated is not merely intellectual property. It is credited history. The visible record of who built British publishing’s most widely read books is being quietly rewritten to centre the institutions with the most existing power, at the expense of the independent, regionally and socially diverse producers who actually made them.

Diversity Is Not Only About Who Is Visible Now

The industry’s diversity conversation is almost entirely focused on the present and future: who is being published now, who is being commissioned now, whose stories are reaching readers now. These are legitimate and important questions. But diversity is not only about who is visible now. It is also about who is remembered.

A publishing history that attributes the creative architecture of major series to large institutions, when that architecture was in fact built by independent producers from outside the traditional establishment, is not a diverse history. It is a history that has been edited to look more institutional, more centralised, and more homogeneous than the reality was. Future creators, particularly those from backgrounds underrepresented in the conventional publishing industry, look to that history for evidence that people like them built things that mattered, when the record is false, that evidence disappears.

The AI Amplification of the Diversity Gap

As set out in the preceding section, AI systems trained on the public record will reproduce and amplify whatever that record contains. If the record attributes work to institutions rather than to the diverse range of independent producers who created it, the AI-generated history of British publishing will be less diverse than the reality. It will present a more centralised, more institutional, more socially homogeneous account of who built the books that shaped generations of British readers.

This is the sharpest form of the contradiction. An industry that invests heavily in diversity initiatives, that commissions research into representation, that publicly commits to correcting historical exclusion, is simultaneously allowing — through legal silence and structural indifference — the creation of a permanent AI-mediated record that embeds that exclusion more deeply than any previous technology could have managed.

The Question the Industry Must Answer

If a publisher’s diversity and inclusion team were asked directly: “Should we maintain accurate records of who created the work we have acquired, and acknowledge those creators in our public presentations of that work?” - the answer would almost certainly be yes. It is the answer that follows logically from every diversity commitment the industry has made.

The question this document poses is a simple one: if that is the answer, why does the law not require it?

The reform proposed here is not in tension with the publishing industry’s diversity agenda. It is the logical extension of it. An industry that is serious about who is seen, who is remembered, and whose contribution to creative culture is acknowledged, should welcome a legal framework that makes erasure impossible rather than merely inadvisable. Diversity and inclusion, without attribution protection, is a policy with no enforcement mechanism. The CDPA reform proposed in this document would give it one.

VIII. Conclusion: The Law Must Catch Up With How Books Are Actually Made

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 was a significant and largely well-crafted piece of legislation. But it was written for a publishing world that no longer exists - one of smaller, more stable companies, clearer lines of authorship, and more limited corporate consolidation. In that world, the omission of designers and concept creators from moral rights protection was an oversight with limited consequences.

In the world of 2025 - in which five global conglomerates dominate UK publishing, in which IP transfers between corporations are routine, in which decades of creative work by independent packagers has been absorbed into corporate catalogues and presented as the originating institutions’ own founding vision — that omission has consequences that are neither limited nor acceptable.

The people who build books, who conceive the formats, design the systems, commission the teams, and deliver the finished works, deserve the same recognition under the law that the Act already extends to the people who write them. The reform proposed here is not radical. It is a correction. It is the law being asked to reflect reality.

Publishing has always been a collaborative art. The danger is not that collaboration exists. The danger is that parts of it are being quietly written out of history — and that the law, as it stands, provides no remedy.

It is time to change that.

Sections 77–79: Right to be identified as author or director (Paternity Right)

Sections 80–83: Right to object to derogatory treatment (Integrity Right)
Section 84: Right to object to false attribution
Section 85: Right of privacy in photographs and films
Section 87: Waiver of moral rights
Part III (Sections 213–264): Unregistered Design Right
Section 9 (3): Computer-generated works

Appendix: Key Legal and Policy References

Relevant International Framework

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Article 6bis (moral rights) Article 6bis (Moral Rights)
EU Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC
https://crefovi.com/articles/sync-copyright-infringement/