UK High Court Issues Mixed Ruling in Getty Images vs. Stability AI Case

According to Cointelegraph, the United Kingdom's High Court of Justice delivered a mixed verdict on Tuesday in the intellectual property case between Getty Images and Stability AI, filed in 2023. The ruling largely favored Stability AI but left unresolved questions regarding the use of copyrighted material by artificial intelligence. Getty Images, which licenses its extensive library of copyrighted stock images for a fee, accused Stability AI's Stable Diffusion model of infringing on its trademark and copyrighted content. The court found that the AI model did infringe on Getty's trademark by reproducing its watermark in certain instances. However, Justice Joanna Smith noted that these findings were "extremely limited in scope." Justice Smith ruled that Getty Images failed to demonstrate that any UK users employed Stable Diffusion to reproduce the watermark, a requirement under UK law to establish "primary infringement." The court also dismissed the "secondary infringement" claim, as the AI model does not store or reproduce the images, thus not meeting the criteria for a violation under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) of 1988. Smith stated that while an "article" may be intangible under the CDPA, an AI model like Stable Diffusion, which neither stores nor reproduces any Copyright Works, does not constitute an "infringing copy," and therefore, no infringement occurs under sections 22 and 23 of the CDPA. The ruling suggests that while brands may still protect their trademarks from AI reproduction, the specificities of this case prevent it from setting a broad legal precedent. This leaves significant questions about AI training and intellectual property open for further discussion. In a related development, 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 concluded that images generated by AI models do not constitute copyright infringement as they do not closely resemble the original works on which the models were trained. The absence of robust legal protections for content creators and artists has led several blockchain and Web3 companies to develop 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 track original ownership and assign royalty rights for various creative works, such as art, essays, books, and musical productions.