Getty Images (US), Inc. and others v Stability Al Ltd [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch)
Following trial in June 2025 the High Court’s judgment has now been handed down in the Getty Images v Stability Ai litigation, neutral citation [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch). The case has been described as ‘the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry’ – The Independent; ‘a landmark legal dispute’ – the FT; and a “landmark case for copyright law” – The Times.
Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE’s 200-page judgment records the development of Stability AI’s early generative AI models, tackles the nuances of training an AI image generation system, and assesses Getty Images’ claims that certain prompts will cause the models to produce infringing content.
The Judgment records the Court’s findings on Getty Images’ claims for trade mark infringement under section 10(1), section 10(2) and section 10(3) of the Trade Marks Act, passing off, and in respect of secondary infringement of copyright. The issues of copyright infringement by training and developing the models, and copyright infringement by creation of model outputs, were dropped by Getty Images after the conclusion of oral evidence.
The Court concluded that while Getty Images succeeded (in part) in the Trade Mark infringement claim, the Court’s findings on trade mark infringement were both “historic” and “extremely limited in scope“, and no finding of trade mark infringement was made at all in respect of the more recent models in dispute: Stable Diffusion XL, XL Turbo, and 1.6.
On the secondary infringement claim, the Court decided that an intangible such as the weights of the Stable Diffusion models could be an article within the meaning of the CDPA, but concluded that it was not an act of secondary infringement to deal in any models in the UK because the models were not themselves copies of any of the copyright works asserted.
Hugo Cuddigan KC and Edward Cronan acted for Stability AI.
[2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) with Appendix A and Appendix B