Copyright vs AI: London court does not help image agency Getty Images

The High Court of Justice for England and Wales does not consider itself competent regarding the core accusation of image agency Getty Images against the London-based AI company Stability AI. Getty accuses Stability AI of using millions of copyrighted photos from the Getty database to train the Stable Diffusion models. However, Stability AI did not train its models in England or Wales. Therefore, Judge Joanna Smith declared herself incompetent; the case could at best be heard where the training actually took place.

The further accusation that the AI model, already trained and imported into England, is itself an infringing copy of the training images, was dealt with in substance by the judge but not upheld: Although the model weights change during training through protected works, the model itself does not store copies of the photos. Therefore, the storage of the calculated model does not constitute an infringing reproduction of the original images.

In the proceedings, Stability AI pointed out that a training dataset comprised up to 220 terabytes, while the finished model weights were only 3.44 gigabytes in size. According to the ruling, the AI system learned patterns but did not store images.

Success for Getty in trademark infringement

The court only rules in favor of Getty Images on parts of the trademark infringement allegations. Stable Diffusion version 1.x repeatedly generated images in which logos of Getty subsidiary iStock appeared, even though iStock has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, Stable Diffusion version 1.x and version 2.1 generated images in which logos that strongly resembled Getty logos were visible.

The court considers both to be trademark infringement and rejects Stability AI's argument that the responsibility lies solely with the users of the model. Both parties can appeal against the ruling of Tuesday. The case is called Getty Images et al. v. Stability AI and has the case number IL-2023-000007.

Parallel proceedings in the USA

Despite Getty Images' partial success, the company's shares fell by nine percent after the ruling. Stability AI expressed its satisfaction with the decision.

Getty wants to use findings from this dispute in a similar lawsuit in the USA against the British company. The case generally highlights the legal and financial challenges faced by AI developers and rights holders. This was already shown by a previous lawsuit against Anthropic and its model, Claude. Many legal questions remain open regarding AI-generated content.

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