When copyright becomes unenforceable, who pays for creativity?
Joe Naylor just dropped some uncomfortable truths about the billion-dollar battle between AI companies and the creators they're scraping from.
Here's what the CEO of ImageRights revealed in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation:
→ The $6.3M wake-up call: One photographer included a single sentence in his contract—"non-transferable and non-assignable"—and turned it into the largest jury statutory damage award in US history. That's $150,000 per photo.
→ Big Tech's selective spending: AI companies will drop billions on NVIDIA chips and data centers, but ask them to pay for the actual content training their models? Suddenly it's a "national security threat" and we'll "lose to China."
→ Stock photography is dead: If you're shooting generic office scenes for licensing, AI already replaced you. But if you're shooting Taylor Swift? You're irreplaceable. The gap between commodity and craft just became a chasm.
The uncomfortable truth? Courts are calling AI training "exceedingly transformative"—but conveniently ignoring that the outputs directly compete with the creators whose work trained the models.
Half a billion images hit the internet every day. Getty ingests tens of thousands before lunch. And the question isn't whether AI scraped your work—it's whether you registered it with the copyright office before they did.
So here's Supergood's question: If AI can generate anything you can create, what makes your work worth protecting, and worth paying for?
