UK court mostly sides with Stability AI in AI copyright lawsuit – News

A UK court has mostly sided with Stability AI Ltd. in a case that focused on the startup’s use of copyrighted images to train artificial intelligence models.

The High Court of Justice issued the ruling today.

London-based Stability AI is an AI model developer backed by more than $170 million in funding. The company is best known for creating Stable Diffusion, a series of open-source text-to-image models. The algorithm family was the focus of the case in which today’s ruling was issued.

In early 2023, stock photo provider Getty Images Holdings Inc. sued Stability AI for copyright infringement. The complaint charged that the AI provider broke the law by using millions of photos from the Getty Images database to train its Stable Diffusion models. Some of the photos in question are owned by Getty Images, while others are distributed through its platform under an exclusive license.

The court dismissed the copyright infringement argument on the grounds that Stability AI didn’t train its models in the UK. “Getty Images may be able to maintain such a case in the jurisdiction where the Model was in fact trained, but there is no basis for that case in this jurisdiction,” Justice Joanna Smith wrote in the ruling. 

Getty Images also accused Stability AI of secondary copyright infringement. The allegation rested on the argument that the Stable Diffusion models’ development would have constituted copyright infringement had it been carried out in the UK. That argument also failed to convince the court. 

Justice Smith dismissed the allegation on the grounds that a model trained on copyrighted images is not a copy of those images. “While it is true that the model weights are altered during training by exposure to Copyright Works, by the end of that process the Model itself does not store any of those Copyright Works; the model weights are not themselves an infringing copy and they do not store an infringing copy,” Smith wrote.

The court did rule in favor of Getty Image on the third major point raised by the case. The argument focused on the fact that the images in the company’s library contain watermarks. Those watermarks display the logo of either Getty or a subsidiary such as its iStock stock photo unit.

In some cases, the images that users generate with Stable Diffusion models contain the iStock watermark. Getty successfully argued that this phenomenon amounts to trademark infringement. The court rejected Stability AI’s claim that such trademark infringements are the responsibility of a model’s users and not the model developer. 

The AI provider nevertheless welcomed the decision. “We are pleased with the court’s ruling on the remaining claims in this case,” Stability AI said in a statement. “Getty’s decision to voluntarily dismiss most of its copyright claims at the conclusion of trial testimony left only a subset of claims before the court, and this final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue.”

Getty Images, meanwhile, stated that it plans to carry over the findings from the case to a similar lawsuit it’s pursuing against Stability AI in the U.S. Shares of the stock photography provider closed 9.1% lower on the ruling. 

The decision comes two months after Anthropic PBC paid $1.5 billion to end a class-action lawsuit filed over its Claude large language models. A group of authors argued that the company incorporated copyrighted books into its training dataset without permission. 

Photo of the High Court building: Wikimedia