Getty Images suffers major defeat in landmark UK AI lawsuit
Getty Images has largely lost its high-profile legal battle against artificial intelligence developer Stability AI, in a ruling watched closely across the tech and creative industries.
The case, heard at London’s High Court, centred on Getty’s claim that Stability AI unlawfully used millions of its copyrighted photos to train the image-generation system Stable Diffusion. The Seattle-based media company argued that the technology not only learned from Getty's library without permission, but also produced images resembling its copyrighted content, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
However, Getty dropped a core part of its argument during the trial, unable to prove where Stable Diffusion was trained — a key point that legal experts say limits the broader impact of the case on future AI copyright disputes.
In Tuesday’s judgment, Justice Joanna Smith found Getty had “succeeded in part” on trademark infringement, but stressed the result was historic only in a narrow sense and “extremely limited in scope.” The court rejected Getty’s claim of secondary copyright infringement, dealing a significant blow to the company’s effort to hold AI platforms accountable for training data.
Stability AI, meanwhile, avoided the most far-reaching copyright consequences, though questions over how AI models are trained remain far from settled.
Getty’s shares fell more than 6% in premarket trading following the decision, reflecting investor concern over the broader challenge of protecting intellectual property in the age of generative AI.
Similar news
