ByRashi Shrivastava,
Forbes Staff.
Welcome back to The Prompt,
Getty Images largely lost a landmark copyright infringement lawsuit in the U.K. against Stability AI, the company behind popular image generation software Stable Diffusion. In the lawsuit, Getty alleged that Stability AI used millions of its copyrighted images to train its models, and that Stability infringed its trademark by generating outputs that included Getty’s watermarks. But a High Court ruling today dismissed Getty’s copyright infringement claims entirely, though it found some limited evidence for trademark infringement. The ruling is being seen as a win for AI companies in the U.K. as they may be able to avoid legal scrutiny if their models do not store or create exact copies of original works.
Some major AI lawsuits have already been settled in the U.S. In September, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit filed by a group of authors that alleged the company had used pirated copies of its books to train its models. A judge ruled that using the books to train its AI models fell under fair use but that it would be liable for using pirated versions.
