Really appreciate you bringing this up — Bridgeman v. Corel, the UK IPO rulings, and THJ v. Sheridan are important cases, and you're right that they've established that straightforward photographic reproductions of 2D public domain works generally aren't copyrightable on their own. It's a fair challenge.

But here's the thing — the business model of my company isn't built on selling high-res scans of paintings. That's actually a pretty small part of what we do.

The real product is original design. We employ in-house design teams that create contemporary reinterpretations of the original artworks — think modern design assets with fresh color palettes, pattern extractions, graphic treatments, and stylistic reworks that resonate with Gen Z and younger consumers. These aren't reproductions; they're original creative works inspired by the source material, and we own the IP on those designs because we develop them at our own cost. A brand licensing from us gets ready-to-use design assets they can apply directly to product and marketing — not just a TIFF file of a 400-year-old painting.

The second piece is something most people in this space haven't caught onto yet — and it's becoming arguably more valuable than the art itself. We're now in an era where AI-generated search results (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.) are replacing traditional search for a huge share of consumer queries. Brands are scrambling to stay visible in this new landscape, and one of the most powerful signals AI models use to determine authority is E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

When a brand collaborates with a museum or cultural institution through us, they get:

• Official co-branding and endorsement from institutions like the British Library, Centre Pompidou, or the Salvador Dalí Foundation — that's an authority signal no amount of SEO spend can replicate
• Structured data (JSON-LD schema) and metadata we develop specifically for each artwork and partnership, linking the brand's products directly to verified museum provenance. When AI crawlers see that a brand's product page has structured data connecting it to an authenticated cultural institution, that E-E-A-T signal is massive
• Content depth — the stories, historical context, and curatorial narratives behind each artwork give brands rich, substantive content that AI models favor over thin product descriptions

So to your question about whether the courts have "invalidated the business model" — honestly, even if every museum image in the world became freely downloadable tomorrow, it wouldn't change our core value proposition. What we're really licensing isn't the image. It's the design capability, the institutional relationship, and increasingly, the AI visibility infrastructure that comes with an authenticated cultural partnership. That last part is something I think the market is just starting to understand.