Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
The judgment of the UK High Court in the case of Getty Images v Stability AIoutlines the proceedings in a high-stakes intellectual property dispute filed by Getty Images and its affiliated companies against Stability AI Limited. The lawsuit accuses Stability AI of both trademark infringement and secondary copyright infringement relating to its powerful generative art model, Stable Diffusion.
Much of the court’s analysis focuses on the trademark issue: whether synthetic images produced by the AI model that contain distorted Getty Images watermarks create a likelihood of confusion or cause detriment to Getty’s reputation and brands. These claims against the newest Stability AI models (SD XL and v1.6) were dismissed because there was no evidence that a single user in the UK had generated watermarks using these models in real-world use. However, the court found trademark infringement in outputs bearing iStock watermarks* generated by older models and outputs bearing Getty Images watermarks generated by v2.x models.
The court also addressed the complex claim of secondary infringement of copyright, evaluating questions of copyright ownership in specific images, licensing agreements, and the statutory interpretation of an infringing copy under UK law.
The court concluded that an AI model such as Stable Diffusion is not an “infringing copy” for the purposes of the UK copyright law. The court concluded that Stable Diffusion’s model weights do not store or reproduce any of the copyrighted images, even though the model’s training process involved reproductions of those images.
Click here to read the full court decision in Getty Images v Stability AI.
