Getty lawsuit against Stability AI to go to trial in the UK

A UK court ruled a lawsuit from Getty Images against Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI can move on to trial, finding merit in Getty’s insistence that its copyrighted material was used to train AI models. 

The Business and Property Courts of England and Wales under the High Court of Justice ruled on Friday, determining Getty’s claim that the startup used its copyrighted library of images to train the Stable Diffusion model should be investigated further. Stability argued the case should not be heard in a UK court because it said no one involved in the training or development of Stable Diffusion was based in the UK. The company also said it trained the model using US-based cloud computing power from AWS. 

However, Justice Joanna Smith decided evidence from the company and Stability CEO Emad Mostaque “raise the specter that evidence is either inaccurate or incomplete; at the very least suggest a conflict of evidence.” The court pointed to media appearances by Mostaque, where he said Stability helped “fast track” UK residency applications of Russian and Ukrainian developers working on Stable Diffusion. 

The Verge reached out to Stability AI for comment. 

Getty Images also has another copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI in the US. 

Read the ruling here: