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The United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice on Tuesday issued a mixed decision in the intellectual property case of Getty Images v.
Getty owns a library of copyright-protected stock images online – which it licenses to users for a fee – and said that Stability’s stable diffusion AI model, which is trained using online material, infringed his trademark and copyrighted material.
Stability’s Stable Diffusion AI model infringed on Getty’s trademark by reproducing its watermark in some cases. However, the findings were “extremely limited in scope,” Justice Joanna Smith said ruled.
Getty failed to show that any UK users used Stable Diffusion to reproduce the watermark, which is required by UK law to prove “primary infringement”, it said.
Smith also rejected the allegation of “secondary infringement” because the AI ​​model does not store or reproduce images, failing to satisfy the requirements for an infringement under the UK’s 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA). She wrote:
“Although an ‘article’ may be an intangible object for the purposes of the CDPA, an AI model such as Stable Diffusion, which does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works, and has never done so, is not an ‘infringing copy’ so that there is no infringement under sections 22 and 23 CDPA.
The ruling leaves the door open for brands to protect their brands from AI reproduction, but technicalities in the case prevent a broad legal precedent of effect, leaving key questions about AI training and intellectual property open for debate.
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Blockchain and Web3 could provide a critical lifeline to content creators to protect their work
US Judge William Orrick issued a similar ruling in October 2023, dismissing most claims of copyright infringement against Midjourney AI, DeviantArt and Stability AI.
Orrick said that images generated by AI models do not constitute copyright infringement because they bear no resemblance to the original work of the artists on which the models are based.
The lack of legal protection for content creators and artists has prompted many blockchain and Web3 companies create data sourcing solutions to register ownership and verify sources of information, copyrighted material and other intellectual property.
These include non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can be used to track original ownership and assign royalty rights for art, essays, books, musical productions and other creative works.
