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Comment by ryanschaefer | Hacker News Reader

As a legal strategy, could it be these large companies with indemnification clauses want to take these cases on rather than risk smaller companies getting sued without adequate resources and therefore defining a suboptimal precedent?

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And smaller companies and open models cannot offer the same level of indemnity.

Also, this is where having a patent portfolio helps these big companies.

How exactly are patents involved here? This is simple legal department muscle that they're flexing.

Legal muscle involves posturing with enforcement of parents.

Smaller companies certainly can, just at a higher relative level of risk for the overall health of the company.

Yes. And oalso they are being sued on generative AI anyway, might as well get a side of free marketing from it.

They don’t want to take any cases, they want a moat.

Yeah, I'm starting to think this is the case. They are prepared for a legal fight and likely want one sooner rather than later.

Or that Google believes they haven't trained their models using any protected data.

I doubt it. They just think it's fair use.

If that were their line of thought, they could always step in on a case-by-case basis. No company is going to say no to an offer of Google paying all their legal costs and paying any damages if the case is lost.

Makes sense given how much potential liability they're taking on.

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