Stability AI successfully defends Getty Image’s U.K. copyright infringement claim

• Key takeaways:
• The U.K. High Court ruled that Stable Diffusion is not infringing despite being trained on potentially copyrighted works.
• The decision may influence AI copyright cases in Canada due to similarities in copyright laws between the U.K. and Canada.
• The case highlights challenges in class actions for copyright claims, requiring individualized assessments for each work involved.

The U.K. High Court of Justice (the High Court) issued an important decision on November 4 that will be well-received by developers, distributors and users of AI models and systems and a disappointment to the creators and owners of artistic works.^[1]

Most significantly, the Court found that Stable Diffusion, a generative AI tool that creates high-quality images from text descriptions, is not an infringing article merely because it was trained using a process that Getty Images claimed involved copyright infringement. Rather, the Court concluded that the model weights comprising a model never store or reproduce the copyrighted works used in training but are instead a product of the pattern and features learned over time during the training process.

The case also demonstrates some of the challenges associated with identifying output from a generative AI model that infringes on the rights in works used to train it. The High Court held in a January 2025 ruling^[2] that proving a text prompt claim requires a case-by-case comparison of each allegedly infringing output to a specific work of the plaintiff to determine whether the former reproduced a substantial part of the latter. Getty Images ultimately abandoned its claim that outputs generated using Stable Diffusion were infringing copies of its works.

Getty Images did have some success in making out trademark infringement claims…

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