The High Court in London has thrown out Getty Images' main copyright case against Stability AI, marking a key moment for generative AI companies. The case focused on whether building an AI model from copyrighted images counts as copyright infringement.
Getty Images accused Stability AI of "scraping" millions of its photos to train Stable Diffusion, calling it an "existential threat" to the creative industry. But Getty ended up dropping its main claims, including those about how the model was trained and the images it generates.
According to court documents, there was no evidence that model training happened in the UK. That narrowed the case to questions of secondary copyright and trademark infringement, which the court has now decided.
AI models aren't considered infringing copies
The central issue was whether Stable Diffusion itself counts as an "infringing copy" because of the way it was trained. Getty argued that Stable Diffusion was an "infringing copy" because "the making of its model weights would have constituted infringement of the Copyright Works had it been carried out in the UK."
