ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; It’s too expensive to fight every AI copyright battle, Getty CEO says
[Kip Currier: As of May 2025, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) data values Getty Images at nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars.
So it's noteworthy and should give individual creators pause that even a company of that size is publicly acknowledging the financial realities of copyright litigation against AI tech companies like Stability AI.
Even if the courts should determine that AI tech companies can prevail on fair use grounds against copyright infringement claims, isn't there something fundamentally unfair and unethical about AI tech oligarchs being able to devour and digest everyone else's copyrighted works, and then alchemize that improperly-taken aggregation of creativity into new IP works that they can monetize, with no recompense given to the original creators?
Just because someone can do something, doesn't mean they should be able to do it.
AI tech company leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg et al would never stand for similar uses of their works without permission or compensation.
Neither should creators. Quid pulchrum est (What's fair is fair).
If the courts do side with AI tech companies, new federal legislation may need to be enacted to provide protections for content creators from the AI tech companies that want and need their content to power up novel iterations of their AI tools via ever-increasing amounts of training data.
In the current Congress, that's not likely to happen. But it may be possible after 2026 or 2028. If enough content creators make their voices heard through their grassroots advocacy and votes at the ballot box.]
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"On Bluesky, a trial lawyer, Max Kennerly, effectively satirized Clegg and the whole AI industry by writing, "Our product creates such little value that it is simply not viable in the marketplace, not even as a niche product. Therefore, we must be allowed to unilaterally extract value from the work of others and convert that value into our profits."
