Getty Images v. Stability AI: English High Court Rejects Secondary Copyright Claim
The Court also found limited trademark infringement and seemingly departed from EU law.
By Sophie Goossens and Brett Shandler
On 4 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales (the Court) handed down its long-awaited judgment in Getty Images v. Stability AI, a case brought by various entities in the Getty Images group as well as a contributor entity (collectively, Getty), essentially alleging that Stability AI had infringed IP rights asserted by Getty in the course of the development, training, and use of Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion image‑generation AI model.
The Court largely rejected the Getty infringement claims that were before it, save for limited findings on its trademark claim. Notably, the Court dismissed Getty’s secondary copyright infringement claim that for the purposes of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), Stable Diffusion was an “infringing copy” of “an article” containing Getty’s asserted copyright works because it had been imported into the UK and its making in the UK would have constituted an infringement of the copyright in such works.
The Court endorsed the prevailing view that models like Stable Diffusion contain no reproductions of relevant works, i.e., there are no copies in the model. The Court further held that an “article” under UK copyright law can be intangible, a position that appears to conflict with the scope of the EU right of distribution. The Court did not address in its judgment this apparent departure from retained EU law, and arguably lacks the authority to make such a departure absent a ruling from a higher court.
For more detail and analysis, see this Latham article.