The High Court has issued its eagerly awaited judgment (which was around 200 pages long) in Getty Images -v- Stability AI [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch).
The judgment addresses complex questions at the intersection of intellectual property law and generative AI. Getty Images brought claims against Stability AI for trade mark infringement, passing off, and copyright infringement related to Stability’s AI image generator “Stable Diffusion”.
The proceedings originally targeted alleged copying and use of Getty’s content during training and the generation of synthetic images bearing Getty Images’ and iStock watermarks. During the proceedings, Getty abandoned its training and development copyright claim and the database right claim due to the lack of a UK nexus. The “Outputs Claim” based on specific prompts was also abandoned after Stability blocked the prompts. This means that the final judgment is more limited, despite being so long!
The Court’s decision
Secondary copyright infringement: Getty Images had alleged that the act of importing and distributing Stable Diffusion, Stability’s GenAI image generator, into the UK breached sections 22 and 23 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The judge rejected this claim. “Article” can include intangibles. However, the judge said that Stable Diffusion was not an “infringing copy” under UK law because the model weights do not store copies of Getty images. As a result, the judge rejected the importation and possession claims under the CDPA.
Trade marks: In better news for Getty, it had a limited win on its claim for trade mark infringement. The judge ruled that there had been infringements under sections 10(1) and 10(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1994 regarding specific and quite limited instances of watermarks that early versions of Stable Diffusion had generated. The judge dismissed Getty’s reputation claim under section 10(3). Finally, she chose not to rule on the passing-off claim as she took the view that it added nothing beyond the trade mark claim.
Reaction
Getty issued the following statement:
“Today’s ruling confirms that Stable Diffusion’s inclusion of Getty Images’ trademarks in AI‑generated outputs infringed those trademarks. 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. This is a significant win for intellectual property owners.
The ruling delivered another key finding; that, wherever the training and development did take place, Getty Images’ copyright‑protected works were used to train Stable Diffusion. The ruling also established a powerful precedent that intangible articles, such as AI models, are subject to copyright infringement claims in the same way as tangible articles. We will be taking forward findings of fact from the UK ruling in our US case.
Beyond the specifics of the decision, we remain deeply concerned that even well‑resourced companies such as Getty Images face significant challenges in protecting their creative works given the lack of transparency requirements. We invested millions of pounds to reach this point with only one provider that we need to continue to pursue in another venue. We urge governments, including the UK, to establish stronger transparency rules which are essential to prevent costly legal battles and to allow creators to protect their rights.”
Catriona MacLeod Stevenson, General Counsel & Deputy CEO of the Publishers Association joined Getty in urging the UK government to establish stronger transparency rules which are essential to prevent costly legal battles and to allow creators to protect their rights. She said: “this is not the end of the road for UK creators and rightsholders” and pointed out that “this is not the precedential AI and copyright moment that this case may, at one stage, have looked set to deliver. The judgment is hugely limited in scope, fell down on insufficient evidence rather than fundamental legal principle, and does not rule at all on the critical question of whether the training, development and operation of an LLM amounts to primary infringement of copyright in the UK.”
At the time of writing Stability AI had not commented.
