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Stock image site Getty Images sued Stability AI in the US and the UK in February 2023 for training its Stable Diffusion image generator on images scraped from Getty, and for generating images with Getty watermarks. The UK judgement came in last week — and Getty lost on basically everything. [Reuters]
Stability’s scraping was pretty blatant. You could see Getty watermarks in the generated images!
But Mrs Justice Joanna Smith in the High Court ruled the AI would have had to actually store or reproduce the images for it to be a copyright violation. And Getty failed to show that. [National Archives]
Getty had to cut down their original claim quite a bit. Stable Diffusion’s training didn’t happen in the UK at all. Getty demanded that Stability block prompts that were producing apparent copyright infringements — and they did that.
Getty kept the claims that:
- Stable Diffusion violated Getty’s trademarks on Getty Images and iStock Photo by producing fake watermarks, and this misled consumers.
- Stable Diffusion itself constituted a copy of Getty licensed works because it was trained on them.
On the trademarks, the judge found that only high-fidelity copies of the Getty Images or iStock watermarks — and not hilariously mangled AI versions — were violations that might actually confuse a consumer into thinking Stability had licensed the images. Which would be passing off. But Stability has been filtering watermarks a lot better since then.
Getty is not likely to get any damages on this trademark infringement — the judge says:
In the circumstances, there is, in my judgment, no basis whatsoever for a claim for additional damages under the broader provisions of the 2006 Regulations.
The judge says her findings are “historic and extremely limited in scope.”
Getty has of course trumpeted this as “a significant win for intellectual property owners.” Cool story.
Getty gave up on the claim of direct copyright infringement. It kept its claim of secondary copyright infringement — that making Stable Diffusion available in the UK constituted importing infringing copies.
The judge said that Stable Diffusion itself was not literally a collection that included Getty’s copyrighted works. She emphasised the use in the law of the term “infringing copy” — and that it has to be a copy. So this claim just failed.
Getty technically won on trademarks but with no effect, and it just lost on the copyright claim.
So what happens now? Getty says it’s going to use the judge’s findings in the UK action in its still-ongoing US action. Good luck with using a case you just lost to try to win another case, in another country.
