London — Getty Images largely lost its landmark lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI over its image generator at London’s high court on Tuesday.
Seattle-based Getty, which produces editorial content and creative stock images and video, accused Stability AI of using its images to “train” its Stable Diffusion system, which can generate images from text inputs.
The company had sued Stability AI for breach of copyright on the grounds that Stable Diffusion was trained using Getty’s images and that images generated by Stable Diffusion reproduced its copyrighted images.
But Getty dropped that part of its case mid-trial, partly due to a lack of evidence about where Stable Diffusion was “trained“, which intellectual property lawyers said could limit the wider significance of Tuesday’s ruling for the law on AI.
Getty’s claims of trademark infringement and secondary copyright infringement, alleging that Stability AI imported into the UK an AI model which breached its copyright, remained live ahead of the court’s decision.
Judge Joanna Smith said in a written ruling that Getty had succeeded “in part” on trademark infringement in relation to Getty watermarks generated by users of Stable Diffusion, but that her findings were “both historic and extremely limited in scope.”
She dismissed Getty’s secondary copyright infringement claim.
Getty Images said in a statement that the ruling “confirms that Stable Diffusion’s inclusion of Getty Images’ trademarks in AI-generated outputs infringed those trademarks.”
The statement added that the ruling “established a powerful precedent that intangible articles, such as AI models, are subject to copyright infringement claims in the same way as tangible articles“, which Getty said it would use in its parallel lawsuit against Stability AI in the US.
The company’s shares were initially seen down 6.6% in premarket trading following the ruling but by 11.10am GMT were indicated 4.25% higher.
Reuters
