Published: November 5, 2025 at 9:41 am
A High Court ruling largely in favour of Stability AI over Getty Images will “frustrate many in the creative industries”, according to a legal expert.
Getty had accused Stability AI – a London GenAI firm which counts Avatar director James Cameron among several leading names on its board – of infringing its copyright by using 12 million of its images to train the Stable Diffusion AI model.
This summer Getty withdrew its primary copyright and database infringement claims as it was unable to prove that training took place in the UK. The secondary, narrower claim amounted to an accusation that Stability had brought images trained on unlicensed works into the UK – akin to ‘importing infringing copies’.
Justice Joanna Smith disagreed, stating: “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’.”
An accompanying trademark claim alleged that the AI model sometimes generated images with Getty’s watermarks on them. Getty partially succeeded with that claim.
Justice Smith said striking a balance between the creative industries’ interests and the AI industry was “of very real societal importance”.