There's a kaleidoscope of copyright cases aimed at setting boundaries on what AI companies can and can't do with human-produced creative work. Like with other decisions, a recent ruling in Getty's AI copyright case could impact what AI tools are allowed to serve up to their users.
In a London-based case brought against Stability AI by Getty Images, Justice Joanna Smith ruled on Tuesday that the AI company, which makes the popular Stable Diffusion image models, did not violate copyright law in training those models. Smith said that Stability AI did not infringe upon Getty's image copyright protections because it doesn't "store or reproduce any Copyright Works and nor has it ever done so."
As with many AI lawsuits, the UK court decision was narrow and nuanced rather than sweeping. Smith determined that Getty succeeded "in part" when arguing that Stability AI had violated its trademark protections by allowing its users to create images that resemble the iStock and Getty Images logos. That success, she said, applies only under certain statutes or laws.
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Smith called her findings both "historic" and "extremely limited" in scope. It's a sentiment that echoes rulings issued by US courts, highlighting the lack of a consensus among judges when it comes to dealing with copyright claims in the age of AI.
The UK lawsuit was one of the first big cases involving a major content library, which alleged that an AI company had acted illegally by scraping its content from the web. Companies like Stability AI need a vast quantity of human-generated content to build their models. In cases involving similar allegations in the US, Anthropic and Meta emerged largely victorious over authors claiming their books were used for training AI data models without their permission or compensation.
Because of the complexities in Tuesday's ruling, both companies found room to claim victory.
Getty called the outcome a win for intellectual property owners, given that the ruling said Stable Diffusion infringed Getty trademarks when it included them in AI‑generated outputs.
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"Crucially, the Court rejected Stability AI's attempt to hold the user responsible for that infringement, confirming that responsibility for the presence of such trademarks lies with the model provider, who has control over the images used to train the model," Getty said in a statement.
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