When the White House hijacks your work: what creatives can learn from Sabrina Carpenter's fight

When pop princess Sabrina Carpenter discovered her voice soundtracking a White House video of immigration raids, her response was immediate: "This video is evil and disgusting." The video stayed up anyway.

For designers, illustrators, photographers, copywriters and artists of every stripe, this incident exposes an uncomfortable reality about creative work in the modern age: once it leaves your hands, controlling how it's used becomes extraordinarily difficult – with AI posing only one of the many threats.

The White House's co-opting of pop songs, from Sabrina to Olivia Rodrigo to Kenny Loggins, represents an extreme case. But the underlying problem affects all creative professionals. Your carefully crafted illustration might end up promoting values you despise. Your photograph could be repurposed for causes you'd never support. Your design work might be distorted beyond recognition.

The question isn't whether you'll lose some control over your work, but how much – and what you can do about it.

The illusion of total control

Here's the hard truth: perfect control over your creative output is impossible. The moment you publish work online, share it with a client, or license it to anyone, you've released it into an ecosystem where countless people can screenshot, download, remix and redistribute it.

Technology has made copying trivial and enforcement exhausting. Sabrina and her fellow stars discovered this when their objections were met with memes rather than apologies. Blue Öyster Cult's clarification that Sony Music owns the copyright to their 1976 rock classic (Don't Fear) The Reaper didn't stop the White House using it. Even Taylor Swift, arguably the poster child of protecting your intellectual property, has stayed conspicuously silent about her music appearing in White House materials attacking her support for Kamala Harris.

But this isn't just about politics. It's about the fundamental shift in how creative work circulates. A brand might use your design without permission, confident you lack resources for legal action. A competitor could lift your copywriting approach wholesale. Your photography might appear on websites you'd never associate with.

Believe me, I've been talking to creatives about this stuff for decades, and depressingly, it only seems to be happening more and more.

What you can actually do

Accepting you'll never have 100% control over your work doesn't mean surrendering entirely. Here are some practical measures that matter.

Register your copyright. In the UK, copyright exists automatically, but US registration provides crucial enforcement tools if work crosses the Atlantic digitally (which it will). Registration costs are modest compared to legal fees for proving ownership later.

Master your understanding of licensing. Every commission needs clear terms about usage rights, duration and territory. Don't assume clients understand limits. A logo design for UK use might end up on international packaging unless your contract explicitly forbids it. Specify what are called 'moral rights': your entitlement to be identified as creator and to object to derogatory treatment of your work.

Build evidence trails. Watermark portfolio pieces. Maintain dated project files. Document your creative process. When disputes arise, proving you created something first becomes vital. Cloud storage with timestamps helps enormously.

Use technology strategically. Services like Pixsy track where images appear online. Copyscape finds text plagiarism. These tools won't prevent misuse but they'll help you discover it quickly, when action is still possible.

Choose your battles wisely. Legal action is expensive and emotionally draining. Public callouts, like Sabrina's, cost nothing and can be remarkably effective at alerting audiences to misuse. Sometimes reputational damage matters more to misusers than legal threats.

None of this, sadly, is a silver bullet. The current White House will likely continue hijacking pop culture, and creatives everywhere will keep discovering their work in unexpected, unwelcome places. We can't prevent every misuse.

We can, however, understand our rights, document our work, contract carefully, and deploy public platforms strategically. In an age when everything is endlessly reproducible, knowing which fights matter – and which you must reluctantly let go – becomes its own creative skill.