Getty's AI copyright claim fails at the High Court, but wins permission to appeal

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith delivered judgment at the UK High Court on the fourth of November 2025 in Getty Images’ long-running case against Stability AI. Getty had already dropped its claim that training Stable Diffusion on millions of its photographs directly infringed copyright, after it could not show the computing took place on British soil. The judge went on to reject Getty’s remaining copyright argument too: that the model’s weights counted as an “infringing copy” under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. She called the question “novel” and said reasonable lawyers could read the statute differently, but found against Getty on the merits.

Getty did not leave empty handed. Early versions of Stable Diffusion generated images carrying a distorted version of Getty’s watermark, which the judge found to be trademark infringement, though a narrow and historic one, since newer versions of the model no longer produce it. Getty’s claim for infringement of its database right, a separate protection for compiled collections such as its photo archive, failed outright.

A case built to test whether copyright could govern how AI models are trained ended up turning on a narrower question of statutory wording.

The result matters less for Getty than for everyone treating the case as a signal of how UK law will handle AI training. In December, Justice Smith granted Getty permission to appeal the rejection of its copyright claim, while refusing Stability permission to challenge the trademark finding, so Stability must seek that separately from the Court of Appeal. The question of whether copyright can reach AI training conducted abroad, which the UK government’s long-running consultation on copyright and text and data mining, the practice of extracting information from large bodies of text or images to train software, has also failed to resolve, stays open until the appeal is heard.