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Wednesday Nov 5 2025 22:00
2 min
A recent ruling by the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice has delivered a complex verdict in the case of Getty Images v. Stability AI, filed in 2023. The core of the case revolved around whether Stability AI's Stable Diffusion model, trained using publicly available online material, infringed upon the copyright and trademark rights of Getty Images, a company that owns a vast library of stock images licensed to users for a fee.
While Justice Joanna Smith found that Stability AI's model infringed on Getty's trademark by reproducing its watermark in certain instances, she emphasized that these findings were “extremely limited in scope.” She dismissed Getty's claim of failing to demonstrate that any UK users used Stable Diffusion to reproduce the watermark, which is required under UK law to prove “primary infringement.” Furthermore, Smith dismissed the “secondary infringement” allegation, stating that the AI model does not store or reproduce the images, thus failing to meet the requirements for a violation under the UK’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) of 1988.
Although the ruling provides a pathway for brands to protect their trademarks from AI reproduction, the technicalities of the case prevent a broad legal precedent from taking hold. Consequently, key questions surrounding AI training and intellectual property remain open for debate.
In light of the lack of legal protection for content creators and artists, numerous blockchain and Web3 companies have been developing data provenance solutions to record ownership and verify sources of information, copyrighted material, and other intellectual property. These solutions include non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can be used to track original ownership and assign royalty rights for artwork, essays, books, musical productions, and other creative works.
It's worth noting that U.S. Judge William Orrick issued a similar ruling in October 2023, dismissing most copyright infringement claims against Midjourney AI, DeviantArt, and Stability AI. Orrick stated that images generated by AI models do not constitute copyright infringement because they do not bear a resemblance to the artists’ original work on which the models were trained.
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