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Adobe knows enterprise users worry about permissions for generative AI artwork. Adobe Firefly, the company’s generative AI art creation tool, generates copyright claims.
The company specifically mentions enterprise customers in its clause statement:
With Firefly, Adobe will also be offering enterprise customers an IP indemnity, which means that Adobe would protect customers from third party IP claims about Firefly-generated outputs.
That means the company will settle any lawsuits involving Firefly-generated content.
The company knows enterprise customers worry about creating art this way. Adobe chief strategy officer Scott Belsky said at the Upfront Summit earlier this year that Adobe talked to companies about this, and the enterprise position was clear:
“A lot of our very big 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 similar way to using a stock image and making sure that if you’re going to use it in a campaign you better have the rights for it — and model releases and everything else. There’s that level of scrutiny and concern around the viability for commercial use,” 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 legal content, unlike OpenAI and others.
We had to be safe regardless of the 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 in violation of any copyright,” he said.
Adobe general counsel Dana Rao says that approach greatly reduces Adobe’s indemnity clause risk. The enterprise customer knows Adobe trained the model on a limited set of content they had permission to use, and if they get sued, Adobe will cover them.
“If you get sued on a Firefly-generated output, we’ll step in as part of our enterprise contractual agreement and indemnify you. What are we going to indemnify? We’ll indemnify Firefly’s output if it looks like someone else’s work and is a copyright infringement because we know where we got it. “We’re confident we’ll win that case,” Rao told .
Constellation Research founder and principal analyst Ray Wang says Adobe and Adobe Stock creators benefit from the approach. “It’s brilliant. “It applies only to Adobe Stock, and Adobe owns all the creative arrangements in Adobe Stock,” he said. They also allow creators to profit from Firefly-created Adobe Stock derivatives.
Rao says the indemnification only covers Firefly-generated output 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 reassure wary customers 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 says enterprise users know Firefly-generated art will be tested in court, which gives them peace of mind. Adobe, knowing the model’s training content, can feel similarly at ease, even if the law isn’t settled and they may have to pay over time regardless of their position.
