Call Sheet · Reference

What indemnification means

The plain-language version of the question behind the Who defends you block: if your AI-made work gets you sued, who pays for the lawyers. The legal vocabulary sits at the bottom.

The question on a real delivery

Section I

You deliver a thirty second spot. Six months later a letter arrives saying the music in it, or the art style, or a face, infringes someone's rights. The claim may be weak. It does not matter. Someone now has to answer it, and answering costs money before anyone decides who was right.

Indemnification is a written promise about who pays for that. If the company behind the tool indemnifies you, they step in, run the defense, and cover the cost. If nobody indemnifies you, you carry it yourself, and so does your client unless your contract says otherwise.

Almost every AI tool's terms contain an indemnity clause, and in nearly all of them the promise is yours, not theirs. You agree to pay the company's legal bills if they get sued over something you made with their model, including what the model itself produced. They make no promise back. So finding the word indemnity in the terms means nothing. What matters is who is promising to protect whom.

The four labels on the Who defends you tab

Section II

Not in writingVerdict key: claimed

The company says it will defend you for AI output, but it has published no contract text that says so. A promise that lives only in marketing copy is not a contract, so there is nothing to hold the company to. Read the row on the Who defends you tab for where the promise was found and what could not be confirmed.

Enterprise onlyVerdict key: gated

Real cover exists, in real contract language, and none of it reaches an individual subscription. Adobe, Google and OpenAI all work this way, and so does ElevenLabs on the audio side. If you pay for a personal plan and assumed you were covered, this is the label that corrects the assumption.

AI not coveredVerdict key: excluded

The most dangerous label on the Who defends you tab. The company's ordinary terms promise to defend you, which makes the platform look protective, and then one sentence removes AI output from that promise. You read the first half, feel safe, and never reach the carve-out. This label exists so you do not have to find the sentence yourself.

On your ownVerdict key: none

No promise anywhere, on any tier. Usually the paper runs the other way and you are defending them. This is where most of the field sits, and it is not automatically disqualifying. It means the risk sits with you, so you price it, contract for it, and pick your sources accordingly.

What voids the cover you do have

Section III

Every company that offers real cover takes it away on the same few triggers, and two of them are easy to hit by accident.

Touching the safety filters. Disabling, circumventing or ignoring them ends the promise. So can jailbreak-style prompting.
Using the output as a trademark. Put a generated mark into trade or commerce and the cover is gone.
Modifying the output. Some promises, Google's included, apply to unmodified output only. An edit can move the work outside the promise.
Previews and betas. Cover names generally available versions. The early-access model you want to try is usually excluded.
Caps. Cover that exists can still be small. Adobe's is US$10,000 per output. Read the number before you lean on it.

What to do on a client job

Section IV

Name the route before you generate. The same model reached through different doors carries different cover. Sora through the API is covered output. Sora through the consumer app is not.
Check the tier, not the brand. Cover attaches to specific plans. The rows on the Who defends you tab name the gate on each one.
Keep records. Prompts, model versions, dates, references. If a claim comes, the first question is what you made, with what, and when.
Put it in the contract. Say which tools you used and who carries the risk. Silence defaults the risk to whoever has the least paper, and that is usually you.
Reread before delivery. Terms change without notice. Every row on the Who defends you tab carries the date it was read, and a date is a freshness stamp, not a guarantee.

CopySight, and what it is not

Section V

CopySight scans AI-generated images, video and 3D for similarity to protected material, and scores the risk across trademarks, characters, brand designs, celebrity likeness and art styles. You run the work through it before release and get a number, a report, and a log of how the work was made.

It is detection and records, not cover. CopySight does not defend you and does not insure you. What it sells is evidence: proof you checked, and a chain of creation that can back a copyright registration or satisfy an insurer. The company's stated goal is for insurers to accept its score when they underwrite AI work, which would make the check part of how cover gets priced. That future is not here yet.

Pricing starts around US$16 a month for individual creators, with API and enterprise tiers above it. If your work ships to clients and none of the companies you run on defend you, a similarity check plus your own records is currently the strongest position available to a small shop.

The legal terms

Vocabulary

Indemnify

To compensate someone for a loss. In these documents, a promise to pay the costs of a claim.

Defend

To run the legal fight itself, with lawyers, rather than paying afterward. A promise to defend is stronger than a bare promise to indemnify.

Hold harmless

The third verb in the usual trio. A promise not to blame the other party for the loss. The three travel together in most clauses.

Carve-out

An exception written into a promise. The sentence that gives cover with one hand and removes your case from it with the other.

Cap

The most money a promise will ever pay, no matter the size of the claim.

Generally available

The released version of a model, as opposed to a preview or beta. Cover usually names only this.