Creative groups fail to secure UK legal precedent in Getty AI copyright case

Creative groups hoping to secure a legal breakthrough against artificial intelligence groups scraping their content have been left disappointed after Getty Images lost a central plank of a UK copyright lawsuit against Stability AI.

In a nuanced ruling on Tuesday, the High Court in London largely sided with Stability AI after Getty claimed it infringed the photo agency’s intellectual property with its AI image-generation model, Stable Diffusion.

“An AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so) is not an ‘infringing copy’,” Mrs Justice Joanna Smith said in her ruling.

The case is among dozens of copyright lawsuits that have been filed against technology groups around the world over the data used to train the large language models behind their popular AI chatbots.

But lawyers on Tuesday said the London proceedings failed to result in a definitive ruling on whether training AI models using copyrighted works breached intellectual property law after Getty abandoned important parts of its case towards the end of the London trial this year.

Seattle-based Getty dropped its original copyright claim as there was no evidence that training and development of Stable Diffusion took place in the UK. It chose to pursue a narrower case for so-called secondary infringement.

Iain Connor, intellectual property partner at law firm Michelmores, said the highly anticipated case had turned out to be a “massive damp squib”. “The decision leaves the UK without a meaningful verdict on the lawfulness of an AI model’s process of learning from copyright materials,” he added.

The case was being watched closely by media groups and lawyers in the UK, as creators seek greater financial rights when their works are used to train AI models that may disrupt their livelihoods.

Nick Eziefula, partner at law firm Simkins, said the decision “will frustrate many in the creative industries”.

The London ruling comes following a flurry of recent copyright cases in the US that have been seen as a win for AI groups. In June Meta won a US copyright case after a federal court found that its use of millions of books to train its AI models without writers’ consent was “fair use”. Anthropic won a similar case that same month.

Getty’s US-listed shares fell about 5 per cent in early trading in New York following the ruling.

The photo agency group, which provides a wide range of editorial, creative and commercial images, did secure a win on unauthorised use of its commercial identity. The court found that Stability AI, whose Stable Diffusion model can generate images from user commands, was responsible for some images generated by its systems that included Getty watermarks.

Getty is also pursuing legal action against Stability AI in the US. The company said the ruling “confirms that Stable Diffusion’s inclusion of Getty Images’ trademarks in AI-generated outputs infringed those trademarks”, adding that it would be “taking forward findings of fact from the UK ruling in our US case”.

Christian Dowell, general counsel for Stability AI, said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling. “We are grateful for the time and effort the court has put forth to resolve the important questions in this case,” he added.

Robert Guthrie, partner in IP disputes at law firm Osborne Clarke, said the judgment was “a big win for Stability AI and AI developers generally”.

“The finding that Stable Diffusion does not store or reproduce any copyright works will give encouragement to AI developers that AI models trained on third party copyright protected works do not infringe copyright in the UK,” he said.

Catriona MacLeod Stevenson, general counsel and deputy chief executive of the Publishers Association, said the Getty case was “not the end of the road” for UK creators and rights holders.

She added that the judgment was “hugely limited in scope” and “does not rule at all on the critical question of whether the training, development and operation of an LLM amounts to primary infringement of copyright in the UK”.