Possible impacts of AI vendors [LWN.net]

Possible impacts of AI vendors

Posted Feb 23, 2026 15:38 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Is it free software? by paulj
Parent article: The Book of Remind

There is a much more likely outcome on that path - AI is deemed a tool capable of being used for infringement, but not automatically infringing (so it's case-by-case "did this output infringe"), and the big AI vendors get round this by paying the cartels a "permission fee" for "minor" infringement, while the big companies continue to sue over blatant infringement, and "the little guys" get steamrollered because they aren't big enough to threaten the AI vendors' income streams.

As long as the AI vendors can buy their way out of trouble for reasonable money, they will do so. And there's a route to that where the AI vendors pay to cover "accidental" infringement (e.g. a very Star Wars looking "robot flying a spacecraft"), but not infringement where it's "obvious" from the prompt that the user wanted the output to infringe (e.g. "an R2 series astromech droid flying an X-wing starfighter"), where the AI vendor instead forwards prompt, user details, and output to the big copyright holders so that they can pursue the users for infringement.

And that's a situation where the "little guys" get steamrollered. If you can prove that something is infringing on your copyright, then the fact it was made with Google Gemini using Nano Banana doesn't protect the person who used it from legal consequences, but you first have to find out that this is happening, and then take action. Meanwhile, the owners of the Star Wars copyrights (currently Disney) get a fast track to discovering that people are creating infringing material that's derived from their copyrighted material, and all the information they need to sue people on a platter, plus an income stream to cover cases where the AI vendors didn't notice that they were infringing, where the AI vendor is indemnified.

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Possible impacts of AI vendors

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:16 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yes, that seems likely.

The "big guys" in the AI and content fields will continue to find ways to have their interests protected. I do think the AI players will have more influence, and there will be some tilting of how copyright works in favour of the interests of the pushers of the ABNI slice-and-dice machines. There may will be a private arrangement of a truce between the major players in those 2 arenas - by blanket licenses (which will of course indenmify the ABNI slice-and-dicers fully, but not necessarily the users - agreed) - agreed.

The "little guys" will be screwed by both though.

The major content cartels will use ABNI to minimise need for digital artists, re-using all the little bits of stuff that was fed in to the slice-and-dicers and recombined - some of which came from smaller content creators. The major ABNI pushers will make money selling their slice-and-dice machines, and their recombination of humanities prior work to all.

It will be interesting to see how the next generation navigate this world.