Courts are writing the AI rulebook in real time. The New York Times is pressing its case against OpenAI and Microsoft; eight major newspapers filed a companion suit; record labels are suing Suno and Udio over training on unlicensed recordings; Getty’s UK case against Stability AI has narrowed but still targets watermark misuse. Net takeaway: licensing is the path of least resistance.

Meanwhile, the middle of the internet is getting squeezed. On Twitch, a leak showed the top 1% captured a disproportionate share of payouts, evidence of a power curve most creators feel daily. In the broader economy, the richest 1% in the U.S. take roughly a fifth of national income, while millions juggle side gigs just to keep pace (the Fed reports 13% sell things and 9% do short-term tasks).

Here’s the overlooked truth: models don’t see follower counts. For training, a crisp, well labeled 10 second video of a tree is worth the same whether it’s shot by an account with one follower or a billion. The value is in quality, coverage, and provenance. As regulators and rights holders challenge “publicly available” scraping, the premium shifts to data that’s licensed and documented.

That’s why KLED exists. We license, de risk, and enrich real world data (video, audio, text) so labs can train without legal gray zones. Contributors get paid for signal (clarity, metadata, uniqueness, consent), not clout. If you can produce clean, contextualized content, the market finally values what it is, not who you are.

Zoom out. The lawsuits are a forcing function; even Anthropic has been pulled into music lyrics litigation, underscoring how brittle “scrape now, ask later” is.

The next wave of model quality will be built on licensed, high integrity datasets. Kled is the quiet infrastructure for that shift, so a student’s lab notebook, a streamer’s B roll, or a commuter’s dashcam can become model ready assets with the right paper trail.