UK High Court Favors Stability AI In Dispute Against Getty Images Over Copyright Infringement

UK High Court Favors Stability AI In Dispute Against Getty Images Over Copyright Infringement

This is the latest twist in the closely watched conflict between the two parties

Stability AI has won a ruling in the UK High Court in its dispute with Getty Images over the alleged copyright infringement.

The bench of Justice Joanna Smith rejected Getty’s claims of representing thousands of photographers who licence their content on its platform. She highlighted the challenges associated with bringing copyright infringement claims against AI platforms over their use of data for training purposes.

Washington state-based photographer Thomas Barwick’s company, Thomas M Barwick was made a class representative of the 50,000-plus photographers and content contributors. Their work is exclusively licensed to Getty, which Stability AI is alleged to have used to train its AI model Stable Diffusion.

The other claimants comprise four Getty subsidiaries and the photo library iStock, owned by the image licensing giant.

Advised by prestigious law firm, FieldFisher, Getty argued that it would be disproportionate to identify all members of the class owing to their “enormous number and the fact that the works used to train Stable Diffusion are within the defendant’s knowledge.”

However, Stability AI, represented by Bird & Bird, maintained that Barwick did not have “the same interest” as the other copyright owners.

The court stated that she was not convinced that the members represented by Barwick had a common interest, as there was no definitive list of the copyright works used to train Stable Diffusion and no way to identify the members.

Justice Smith added: “I see no basis on which the court can be satisfied that any particular person qualifies as a member of the class proposed or that it therefore has jurisdiction to permit this representative claim.”

In December 2023, a judge in the High Court refused attempts by Stability AI to reject Getty’s IP infringement claims.

The matter is currently pending before the High Court in London.

Jennifer Heley, the IP counsel at Linklaters commented, “The ongoing litigation between Getty and Stability AI illustrates broader challenges facing the English legal system in adapting traditional legal mechanisms to the evolving landscape of AI and the copyright law.”

She added that Getty avoided the “significant administrative (and potentially impossible) exercise of joining all these parties, likely to be in excess of 50,000 copyright owners, by relying on the regime in the Civil Procedures Rules (CPR) 19.8 (representative parties).”

Heley said that the decision, “limits the works Getty can rely on in this case to those it owns, unless it joins relevant exclusive licensors to the case.”

She asserted that the judge left the door open for Getty to make an application under CPR 19.3 to ask the court to allow it to bring the claim without joining all relevant parties.

The Linklaters counsel expressed, “Getty would need to satisfy the court that there was no risk to Stability AI of future claims (from those claimants bringing independent claims). The ways this could be done include Getty indemnifying Stability AI or getting undertakings from all potential claimants that they won’t sue independently.”

Meanwhile, Gill Dennis, the IP expert at Pinsent Masons, stated, “It is very difficult for content creators to prove that their works have been used as training data. Even AI developers do not always know with certainty what data they used. This objection will, therefore, always be an obstacle to a representative claim where copyright infringement in the context of generative AI is alleged.”

Dennis added that one of the proposals in the consultation “is to impose an obligation on AI developers to be more transparent around the training data they use. If this proposal is accepted and implemented, it would solve the class definition issue encountered in this case.”