UK court grants Getty permission to appeal Stability AI ruling

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith, who had largely rejected Getty’s copyright claims against Stability AI the previous November, granted Getty permission to appeal that finding. The November judgment had dismissed Getty’s secondary copyright infringement claim while upholding a narrower trade mark claim over historical versions of Stable Diffusion that reproduced Getty’s watermarks.

The appeal turns on a question the judge described as a pure point of law on which reasonable lawyers could disagree: whether Stable Diffusion, whose weights do not store or reproduce any of the images it was trained on, can nonetheless count as an “infringing copy” under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No UK court had previously ruled on how that statutory language applies to a trained AI model, and the answer could shape how generative-AI training is treated under UK copyright law more broadly. Stability separately sought permission to appeal the trade mark finding against it; the judge refused, holding those grounds had no real prospect of success, leaving Stability to seek permission directly from the Court of Appeal if it wished to pursue the point.

The ruling kept open the question at the centre of the case — whether training a model on copyrighted images without a licence, without the model retaining or reproducing those images, infringes copyright — as one of the first tests of the issue anywhere with a substantive court record behind it, rather than a settled or dismissed dispute.