Adobe indemnification clause designed to ease business fears about AI-generated art

Image credits: oxygen / Getty Images

When it comes to artwork created by generative AI, business users have specific legal issues around permissions, and Adobe has acknowledged those concerns. That’s why the company wrote an indemnity clause stating that Adobe will pay any copyright claims related to works generated in Adobe Firefly, the company’s generative art creation tool.

In a statement about the clause, the company specifically refers to these corporate customers:

With Firefly, Adobe will also offer enterprise customers an intellectual property indemnity, which means that Adobe will protect customers from third-party intellectual property claims on outputs generated by Firefly.

This means that the company is ready to pay any claim should a customer lose a lawsuit for the use of content generated by Firefly.

The company knows that corporate customers are concerned about creating artwork this way. Speaking at the Upfront Summit earlier this year ahead of Firefly’s release, Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief strategy officer, said Adobe has spoken to companies about this and the company’s position was crystal clear:

Many of our very large enterprise customers are very concerned about using Generative AI without understanding how it was trained. They don’t see it as viable for commercial use in a way similar to using a stock image and making sure that if you’re going to use it in a campaign, you better have the rights to it, model releases and all. There’s that level of scrutiny and concern about the viability for commercial use, she said.

Belsky says that while the court has yet to rule on copyright issues related to content created with generative AI, Adobe feels comfortable taking this position because it has trained Firefly on Adobe Stock images, which has broad license to ‘use, together with open licenses content and content in the public domain whose copyright has expired. Unlike OpenAI and some other companies, it’s not training on the open Internet, only on content it’s legally able to use.

We had to be safe regardless [of how the courts might rule]. And that was a really helpful direction. And so, what we did was decide to train when we launched this first family of generative AI models, everything was trained on Adobe Stock or open datasets that aren’t infringing on any kind of copyright, he said.

This approach significantly reduces Adobe’s risk associated with offering the indemnification clause, said Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel. The enterprise customer knows that Adobe trained the model on a limited set of content they had permission to use, and if they’re still being sued for some reason, Adobe covers them up.

If you are sued for an output generated by Firefly then we will take action as part of our corporate contractual agreement and we will indemnify you and what will we indemnify? We will indemnify Firefly’s output if this is someone else’s work, and looks like their work and would be copyright infringement because it was [someones] work, we will compensate you because we know where we got our work from. And so we feel good that we’re going to be able to win that case, Rao told TechCrunch.

Constellation Research founder and principal analyst Ray Wang says the approach is smart for both Adobe and the creators who contribute to Adobe Stock. It’s actually a brilliant move. Here’s why: It only applies to Adobe Stock, and Adobe owns all creative arrangements in Adobe Stock, he said. They also allow creators to earn money from their work on Adobe Stock derivatives created in Firefly.

The company sets limits on how far the indemnity will go, saying it only covers specific output generated by Firefly and not anything else you can add to the output that could infringe a copyright, such as adding a Spiderman likeness to the artwork, says Rao.

He sees the approach more like an insurance policy than a legal gimmick, designed to reassure shady customers that it’s safe to use this technology for commercial purposes. The law isn’t settled and I can’t tell you which way the copyright cases will go but I can guarantee you being born in the United States of America that there will be a lot of lawsuits so insurance is quite attractive [to our enterprise customers]and not really a gimmick.

He says business users also recognize the likelihood of legal testing on the use of art generated with technologies like Firefly, giving them some peace of mind. Adobe, knowing the content the model was trained on, can feel just as comfortable, even if the law is not settled and even if they may have to make payments over time regardless of their location.