Honestly I think a large part of the value add of machine learning is going to be the ability for huge entities to launder intellectual property violations.
As an example, my grandfather (an old school EE who got his start on radar systems in the 50s, who then got his radiology MD when my jewish grandmother berated him enough with "engineer's not doctor though...") has some really cool patents around highlighting interesting parts of the frequency domain in MRIs that should make detection of cancer a whole lot easier. As an implementation he did a bunch of tensor calculus by hand to extract and highlight those features because he's an incredibly smart old school EE with 70 years experience cranking that kind of thing out with only his trusty slide rule. He hasn't gotten any uptake from MRI manufacturers, but they're all suddenly really into recurrent machine learning models to highlight the same sorts of stuff. Part of me wants to tell him to try selling it as a machine learning model and just obfuscate the fact that the model was carefully hand written rather than back propagated.
I'm personally pretty anti intellectual property (at least how it's implemented in the states), but a system where large entities that have the capital investment to compute the large ML models can launder IP violations, but little guys get stuck to the letter of the law certainly seems like the worst of both worlds to me.