The money we are talking about.. A lot of these rights holders have more than enough cash on hand to bring a suite and potentially destroy Anthropic/OpenAI with the right case.
Who? Netflix and Disney are the largest media rights holders, and they have market caps of ~$250 billion and ~$190 billion, respectively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both privately held, but currently have valuations of somewhere in the $1-2 trillion range.
While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point. The most expensive lawsuit in history by legal fees was (adjusted for inflation) $1.15 billion. That was the 1998 Tobacco masters settlement (involving years of litigation by law firms across 46 states). So any award in the billions makes a case arguably justifiable (even more so when the highest litigation cost cases are often that expensive because the litigation fee includes a percentage of winnings).
Companies like autodesk with a ttm revenue of $7.8 billion would probably have fiscally compelling cases (if not legally compelling) to pursue if reverse engineered tools cut into their revenue. That's without getting into class action cases.
> While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point.
Exactly.
Adobe had a FY2025 operating income of 8.7b on 23.77bn revenue. They employ over 33k people..
So Adobe alone has the money for a law suite that defends themselves from an existential threat, but I would imagine a class action.. It is, IMHO, just a matter of time before these companies put it together and take their shot.
The money we are talking about.. A lot of these rights holders have more than enough cash on hand to bring a suite and potentially destroy Anthropic/OpenAI with the right case.
Who? Netflix and Disney are the largest media rights holders, and they have market caps of ~$250 billion and ~$190 billion, respectively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both privately held, but currently have valuations of somewhere in the $1-2 trillion range.
That is not a fair fight.
While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point. The most expensive lawsuit in history by legal fees was (adjusted for inflation) $1.15 billion. That was the 1998 Tobacco masters settlement (involving years of litigation by law firms across 46 states). So any award in the billions makes a case arguably justifiable (even more so when the highest litigation cost cases are often that expensive because the litigation fee includes a percentage of winnings).
Companies like autodesk with a ttm revenue of $7.8 billion would probably have fiscally compelling cases (if not legally compelling) to pursue if reverse engineered tools cut into their revenue. That's without getting into class action cases.
> While a good rule of thumb for the US court system is that someone with more money can screw over a smaller party. That's only up until a point.
Exactly.
Adobe had a FY2025 operating income of 8.7b on 23.77bn revenue. They employ over 33k people..
So Adobe alone has the money for a law suite that defends themselves from an existential threat, but I would imagine a class action.. It is, IMHO, just a matter of time before these companies put it together and take their shot.
Compared to the sums they bleed, sure, the 3+ billion that Pokémon alone sells every year is peanuts.