LONDON — Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property.
Seattle-based Getty Images, which owns an extensive online library of images and video, had filed suit against Stability AI in a widely watched case that went to trial at Britain’s High Court in June.
The case was among a wave of lawsuits filed by movie studios, authors and artists challenging tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots.
According to a judge’s ruling released Tuesday, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark, but lost its claim for secondary infringement of copyright.
Both sides claimed victory.
“This is a significant win for intellectual property owners,” Getty Images said in a statement.
Shares of Getty dipped 3% before the opening bell in the U.S.
Stability said it was pleased with the ruling.
“This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue,” Stability General Counsel Christian Dowell said.
Getty argued that the development of Stability’s AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, was a “brazen infringement” of its library of images “on a staggering scale.”
While Getty accused Stability of infringing both its copyright and trademark, the company dropped its primary copyright allegations during the trial, indicating that it didn’t think its arguments would succeed.
Getty also sued for trademark infringement because its watermark appeared on some of the images generated by Stability’s chatbot.
Justice Joanna Smith said in her ruling that Getty’s trademark claims “succeed (in part)” but that her findings are “both historic and extremely limited in scope.”
Stability argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the AI model’s training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. It also argued that “only a tiny proportion” of the random outputs of its AI image-generator “look at all similar” to Getty’s works.
Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images.
Getty is also still pursuing a claim of “secondary infringement” of copyright, saying that even if Stability’s AI training happened outside the U.K., offering the Stable Diffusion service to British users amounted to importing unlawful copies of its images into the country.
Smith dismissed Getty’s argument, saying that Stable Diffusion’s AI didn’t infringe copyright because it doesn’t store “store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so).”
Getty is also pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States against Stability. It originally sued Getty in 2023 but refiled the case in a San Francisco federal court in August.
The Getty lawsuits are among a slew of cases that highlight how the generative AI boom is fueling a clash between tech companies and creative industries.
Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.
Separately, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from a group of 13 authors who made similar accusations against Facebook owner Meta Platforms in training its AI system Llama.
Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that its image generator enables subscribers to create AI-generated images and videos of copyrighted characters like Superman and Bugs Bunny.
Disney and Universal also sued Midjourney earlier in a separate, joint copyright lawsuit, alleging the San Francisco-based startup pirated the libraries to generate and distribute unauthorized copies of famed characters like Darth Vader and the Minions.
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AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.
