Adobe understands enterprise users’ concerns about generative AI artworks’ legality. Adobe Firefly, the company’s generative AI art creation tool, generates copyright claims.
The corporation expressly mentions enterprise customers in its clause statement:
Adobe will provide enterprise customers with an IP indemnification for Firefly-generated products. That means the firm will settle any lawsuits over Firefly-generated content.
The company knows enterprise customers worry about making art this way. Adobe chief strategy officer Scott Belsky noted at the Upfront Summit earlier this year that Adobe talked to organizations about this, and the enterprise viewpoint was clear:
Our large corporate customers are worried about utilizing generative AI without understanding how it was taught. Like using a stock image and ensuring you have the rights and model releases to use it in a campaign, they don’t consider it viable for commercial use. “There’s that level of scrutiny and concern around commercial viability,” he said.
Belsky says Adobe feels comfortable taking this stance because it has trained Firefly on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where the copyright has expired. It trains on lawful content, unlike OpenAI and others.
“We had to be safe regardless [of court ruling]. That helped. “When we launched this first generative AI family of models, everything was trained on either Adobe Stock or open datasets that are not violating any copyright,” he stated.
Adobe general counsel Dana Rao said such a method considerably decreases Adobe’s indemnity clause risk. The enterprise customer understands Adobe trained the model on a limited set of content they received authorization to use, and if they are sued, Adobe will protect them.
“If you get sued on a Firefly-generated output, we’ll step in as part of our enterprise contractual agreement and repay you. What are we going to repay? We’ll repay Firefly’s output if it looks like someone else’s work and is a copyright infringement because we know where we obtained it. “We’re confident we’ll win that case,” Rao told TechCrunch.
Constellation Research founder and chief analyst Ray Wang said the approach is smart for Adobe and Adobe Stock providers. “It’s brilliant. “It applies only to Adobe Stock, and Adobe owns all the creative arrangements in Adobe Stock,” he stated. The Adobe Stock derivatives generated in Firefly allow creators to profit from their works.
Rao claims the indemnification only covers Firefly-generated products and not anything else that could infringe on a copyright, like adding Spiderman to the artwork.
He sees the approach more as an insurance policy than a legal gimmick to persuade wary clients that this technology is safe for commercial use. “The law is not settled, and I can’t tell you which way the copyright cases will go, but I can guarantee you having been born in the United States of America that there will be a lot of lawsuits, so that insurance is pretty attractive [to our enterprise customers], and not really a gimmick.”
He said enterprise users know Firefly-generated art will be tested in court, which provides them peace of mind. Knowing the model’s training content, Adobe can feel similarly at rest, even though the law isn’t resolved, and they may have to pay over time regardless of their position.
