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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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