getty images spent years watermarking every photo on the internet. sued stability AI for training on their library. demanded the AI companies pay up. called it theft. filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. the AI companies didn't pay. they just... kept going and designers stopped buying stock photos. and the $500 licensing fees stopped making sense when midjourney exists. and the debt piled up. a company whose entire business model was "we own the visual record of human history, pay us" just got outrun by a model that learned from that record and started giving it away for free. The irony is that the watermark is still on every image in the archive. even the ones nobody's licensing anymore.