England’s High Court has issued the UK’s first ruling in a copyright fight against an AI developer with an outcome that favors the AI industry. In Getty Images v. Stability AI, Getty (which licenses photos and video) alleged that Stability scraped millions of its images to train the Stable Diffusion image generator. During trial Getty dropped its main copyright claim because it could not show the training actually happened in the UK. Copyright is territorial, so no act in the UK means no UK infringement.
That left a narrower question: whether importing the already-trained model into the UK made it an “infringing copy” under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The court said no. A model’s weights are just numbers derived from statistics; they do not store or contain the underlying images, so supplying the model is not secondary infringement. Getty won only on a historic and limited trademark point about its marks appearing in outputs. The decision settles little about whether UK-based training would infringe, and Getty may appeal.
