According to Silicon Republic, the London High Court just dismissed major portions of Getty Images’ copyright lawsuit against UK startup Stability AI in a ruling on November 4. Getty had sued Stability AI back in 2023, claiming the company “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” from its photo archive to train the Stable Diffusion model. The court agreed Getty’s images were used for training and that Stability infringed on trademarks in some cases. But crucially, Justice Joanna Smith ruled that an AI model like Stable Diffusion that doesn’t store or reproduce copyright works isn’t an “infringing copy” under UK law. Most of Getty’s initial claims were actually abandoned during trial, leaving only secondary infringement and trademark issues that ultimately failed.
Sponsored content — provided for informational and promotional purposes.
<h2 id="copyright-implications”>What this means for copyright
This is way bigger than just Getty versus Stability. The ruling basically says that if an AI model doesn’t actually contain copies of copyrighted material in its weights, it’s not infringing just by existing. That’s a huge deal for how we think about AI training. Legal experts are already warning this could mean the UK’s secondary copyright regime isn’t strong enough to protect creators. Getty poured millions into this case and came up mostly empty-handed. Now they’re calling for governments to establish stronger transparency rules so creators don’t have to fight these costly legal battles.
Where Stability stands now
Stability’s legal team basically got everything they wanted here. Their argument that the model weights don’t contain Getty’s copyrighted works held up in court. They also successfully argued that Getty couldn’t prove any UK user actually generated outputs with Getty’s watermarks. After the ruling, Stability’s counsel pointed out that Getty had already voluntarily dismissed most of its copyright claims before this final decision. So what started as a massive copyright battle ended up being much narrower in scope. This gives Stability and other AI companies more legal breathing room in the UK market.
The broader implications
Here’s the thing – this case isn’t happening in a vacuum. Getty is currently facing a UK competition watchdog investigation into its proposed multibillion-pound merger with Shutterstock. And just last week, Getty announced a partnership with AI browser Perplexity to display licensed imagery in AI search tools. That deal looks pretty strategic now – if you can’t beat AI companies in court, maybe you join them. Meanwhile, legal experts like Dr Barry Scannell warn this ruling could collide with European data protection opinions about personal data in AI models. The fight over AI training data is far from over, but this UK ruling definitely shifts the balance toward AI companies for now.
