Adobe offers copyright indemnification for Firefly AI-based image app users

Adobe’s latest product offering is Firefly, a generative-AI powered image maker that is designed to be “safe for commercial use” — so much so that Adobe is offering IP indemnification for any legal issues arising from its use.

Adobe billed Firefly, which was released in beta today, as a way of providing AI-powered image creation and editing to enterprise users, boasting that it can provide “commercially viable, professional quality content at speed.” The company said that the AI was trained on stock images owned by the company, public domain content and other openly licensed or non-copyright material.

Businesses interested in using the enterprise version of Firefly should expect to pay a flat fee — Adobe declined to share a precise figure — for a companywide license to use the generative AI tool. The company said that the price would be determined based on the “needs and size” of the organization in question, according to a spokesperson.

The emphasis in Adobe’s announcement was on commercial use cases. Where generative AI, without specialized training and restrictions, sometimes provides strange or legally problematic responses to prompts, Firefly is being marketed as the “commercially safe” option.

And while Firefly’s limited training data sets are designed, in part, to ensure that it won’t infringe on existing intellectual property, Adobe is doubling down on the safety of the system by offering an IP indemnification clause in its user agreement.

The indemnification offer is similar to the one available for Adobe’s Stock assets product — though not, according to an Adobe spokesperson, identical. The basic idea of the Stock indemnification is that, as long as the customer is using the product within the terms and conditions, Adobe will compensate the customer for any IP-related legal claims that might arise. The spokesperson emphasized that the final details for Firefly are still being hammered out, as Firefly is currently in beta, and noted that the Firefly for Enterprise offering is not expected until the second half of this year.

Firefly will also automatically generate a “content credentials” tag for all created images, listing the name of the image, date created and tools used to create it. Content Credentials will be a free and open source tool, Adobe said, and is meant to act as a “digital ‘nutrition label,’” letting consumers know more about the provenance of generated content.