Getty Images suffered a major setback in its closely watched copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI, after London’s High Court largely ruled in favor of the tech firm, Reuters reported.
The Seattle-based image licensing giant had accused Stability AI of using millions of its photographs without authorization to train its popular image-generation tool, Stable Diffusion. Getty argued that the AI system unlawfully reproduced elements of its copyrighted images and logos, seeking to establish one of the first major precedents on intellectual property and AI training data.
However, Getty dropped its primary copyright claim midway through the trial, citing a lack of concrete evidence about where Stability AI’s model had been trained — a move that legal experts said weakened the broader implications of the case for AI law.
Judge Joanna Smith ruled that Getty succeeded only “in part” on a limited trademark infringement claim, finding that Stable Diffusion’s outputs occasionally reproduced Getty’s watermark. She described the issue as “historic and extremely limited in scope,” dismissing Getty’s claim of secondary copyright infringement entirely.
In a statement, Getty said the decision confirmed that Stable Diffusion’s inclusion of Getty’s trademarks in AI-generated images violated its rights, calling the outcome “a powerful precedent that intangible articles, such as AI models, are subject to copyright infringement claims in the same way as tangible articles.” The company added that it plans to build on the ruling in its ongoing U.S. lawsuit against Stability AI.
The case is one of several global legal battles testing how existing copyright and trademark laws apply to generative AI systems, a key question as the technology continues to reshape creative industries.
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