UK High Court largely rejects Getty's copyright claims against Stability AI
The court held that Stable Diffusion's trained weights are not a 'copy' of Getty's photographs under UK law; Getty had already dropped its main copyright claim mid-trial.
- Courts & copyright
- Major
Mrs Justice Joanna Smith handed down the UK’s first substantive court ruling on copyright and generative AI training, largely rejecting Getty Images’ case against Stability AI over the Stable Diffusion model. Getty had already abandoned its primary copyright infringement claims — that training on its photographs and reproducing them in outputs infringed UK copyright — part-way through the trial, reportedly because the training itself had taken place on servers outside the UK, beyond the reach of domestic copyright law.
What remained was a narrower “secondary infringement” claim: that Stability had imported an “infringing copy” into the UK by making the trained model available there. The court rejected this too, holding that Stable Diffusion’s model weights — statistically derived parameters — do not constitute a “copy” of Getty’s images in the sense required by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. A recognisable reproduction or embodiment of the original work is required, the court found, and a diffusion model’s weights are not that: no photograph is stored or reconstructible from them in the way the statute contemplates.
Stability did not escape entirely. Getty’s trade mark claims fared better in part: the court dismissed the broader claim under section 10(3) of the Trade Marks Act but found “extremely limited” infringement under sections 10(1) and 10(2), concerning early versions of Stable Diffusion that had reproduced Getty’s watermark in generated images.
The ruling was closely watched because most large AI developers are subject to some jurisdiction with an active copyright dispute, and this was the first time a court had ruled on the legal status of model weights themselves rather than settling before judgment. Because Getty’s core claims were withdrawn rather than tested, the decision left open whether training or output reproduction that does occur within the UK would infringe — the question at the centre of parallel disputes still working through other courts.