On Dec. 1, 2023, Justice Joanna Smith ruled that Getty Images’ UK copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the company that created the AI image generator Stable Diffusion, can proceed.
For the claim involving alleged infringement based on the training and development of Stability’s AI model, the court considered an interesting question whether any of the allleged infringement took place in the United Kingdom, a key element of copyright infringement.
Copyrights are territorial in nature, meaning their scope is limited to the territory or country that granted them. If no infringement occurred in the UK, there would be no copyright claim in the UK.
Justice Smith ruled that, although the defendant had presented “strong support” for its contention that no training of Stability AI’s model took place in the UK, the defendant’s motion for summary judgment could not be granted because at least some evidence suggested otherwise.
-JUSTICE JOANNA SMITH
Whilst the inference pleaded at paragraph 43 of the Particulars of Claim appears somewhat weak (reliant as it is in the original pleading purely upon the location of the Defendant’s development team), it has now been supplemented in the proposed amended pleading by additional factual material which, in my judgment, when taken together with the evidence and the arguments to which I shall now turn, is sufficient to raise a realistic, as opposed to a fanciful, case. I would have held that this was the position on the pleading as it stands (given the evidence), but the amended pleading has, to my mind, substantially strengthened that position.