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ARTICLE · 11 NOVEMBER 2025

Stability AI Defeats Getty Images In Landmark Copyright Case

Gowling WLG
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The long-awaited judgment in Getty Images v Stability AI Limited has been handed down, seeing Stability AI Limited ("Stability") largely victorious and Getty Images ("Getty") calling for the UK government...

United KingdomIntellectual Property
Kate Swaine
Kate Swaine
Amnic Atwal
Amnic Atwal
Ollie Carpenter
Ollie Carpenter
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The long-awaited judgment in Getty Images v Stability AI Limited has been handed down, seeing Stability AI Limited ("Stability") largely victorious and Getty Images ("Getty") calling for the UK government to take steps to support content creators.

The proceedings were issued in January 2023 and attracted global attention for tackling critical questions regarding the use of copyright works to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. While Getty abandoned its primary copyright infringement claims, the judgment still provides important guidance on secondary copyright infringement and the approach to how UK legislation applies to AI development.

As a reminder for those of you who may not have read our previous article, Stability's deep learning AI, named "Stable Diffusion", is alleged to have been trained on millions of images from Getty websites, for which Getty holds the copyright. Getty argued that Stability imported into the UK, otherwise than for private and

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