Getty Images v Stability AI: UK Ruling, Appeal, and US Refiling

Getty Images v Stability AI is a copyright and trademark dispute over Stable Diffusion’s training on Getty’s photograph library, and as of mid-2026 it has produced one major ruling and no settlement. The UK High Court decided the case in November 2025, dismissing Getty’s remaining copyright claim and granting only a narrow trademark win; Getty is appealing. The US case, originally filed in Delaware, was voluntarily dismissed in August 2025 and refiled in the Northern District of California, where mediation is underway and a jury trial is set for early 2028.

What the UK High Court Decided in November 2025

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith handed down a 219-page judgment on November 4, 2025, the first UK ruling to address whether an AI model can infringe copyright.¹ The outcome favored Stability AI on the central copyright question and gave Getty a small, “extremely limited” trademark win.

Getty had filed the case in January 2023, originally raising primary copyright infringement, secondary copyright infringement, database rights, trademark infringement, and passing off.² Much of the case fell away before judgment. Getty abandoned its primary copyright claim after conceding it had no evidence that Stability’s model training took place in the UK. It dropped the database rights claim. And it dropped the “outputs claim” once Stability blocked the specific prompts that had generated infringing images.¹

Secondary Copyright Infringement Dismissed

Getty’s remaining copyright theory was that Stable Diffusion itself was an “infringing copy” under sections 22, 23, and 27(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. On that reading, importing or distributing the model in the UK after it had been trained on Getty’s copyrighted works abroad would amount to secondary infringement.

The judge rejected it. To be an “infringing copy,” she held, an article must at some point store or contain a copy of the copyrighted work, and Stable Diffusion’s weights do not. The weights are “purely the product of the patterns and features which they have learnt over time during the training process,” not repositories of the original images.³ The court did accept that an intangible digital object such as an AI model can be an “article” under the statute, but that alone did not turn the model into an infringing copy.⁴

In an important aside, the judge added that if the model had qualified as an infringing copy, making it available for download in the UK would have constituted secondary infringement.⁴ That made the storage question the decisive legal issue.

A Narrow Trademark Win for Getty

Getty did better on trademarks, though the judge described the finding as “extremely limited in scope.” The court found that Stable Diffusion v1 and v2 generated synthetic images reproducing Getty Images and iStock watermarks, and that at least one UK user would have encountered such outputs. That amounted to infringement under sections 10(1) and 10(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1994.⁴

Claims relating to Stable Diffusion XL and version 1.6 were dismissed because Stability had addressed the watermark problem through filtering in the later models.⁵ Getty’s section 10(3) claim covering dilution and tarnishment was dismissed for lack of evidence of actual harm.⁴ The judge called the infringement “historical” and confined to specific examples, and expressly said the ruling did not suggest Stable Diffusion’s outputs “more generally occasioned trade mark infringement.”

The passing off claim was not decided. The court found it added nothing beyond the trademark findings.⁵

Costs and Damages

The financial outcome tracked the substance of the ruling rather than the trademark headline. At a consequentials hearing on December 16–17, 2025, Getty was ordered to pay 69.4% of Stability AI’s total legal costs, with an interim payment of about £4.4 million.⁶ Commentators called the trademark victory “financially pyrrhic.”⁷

The court ordered a separate damages inquiry on the trademark infringement, but it remained pending as of mid-2026.⁶ No injunction issued, because Stability had already undertaken to retire the older model versions. The judge refused to attach a penal notice to that undertaking, calling the request “unnecessarily inflammatory.”⁸

Getty’s Appeal in the UK

On December 16, 2025, Justice Smith granted Getty permission to appeal the dismissal of its secondary copyright infringement claim, describing it as a “pure question of law” that is “both novel and important.”⁶ The Court of Appeal will decide whether an AI model can be an “infringing copy” under the CDPA even where it does not store the original works, or whether storage of the actual work is required.

Stability AI was denied permission to appeal the trademark findings. The judge found its grounds had “no real prospect of success” and characterized two as attempts to re-argue factual findings.⁸ Stability can still seek permission directly from the Court of Appeal.

Getty had until February 3, 2026, to file its appeal. Based on typical Court of Appeal timelines, a hearing could take place by the end of 2026 with a decision in early 2027.⁷

The US Case: Dismissed in Delaware, Refiled in California

Getty filed its US suit in the District of Delaware in February 2023, alleging copyright and trademark infringement over the use of more than 12 million photographs.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Stability moved to dismiss in October 2025. On April 23, 2026, Judge Thompson granted the motion in part and denied it in part. The DMCA claim over false copyright management information was dismissed without prejudice. Claims for trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, and unfair competition under California law were allowed to proceed.¹²

The parties have been referred to private mediation, which must be completed by October 19, 2026. A jury trial is scheduled for January 18 through February 9, 2028.¹¹

What the Ruling Does and Doesn’t Settle

The UK judgment is the first British court decision on AI and copyright, but it stops short of the question most readers want answered. Because Getty abandoned the primary copyright claim, the court did not rule on whether scraping copyrighted images to train an AI model is itself infringement under UK law.¹³ The finding that model weights are not “infringing copies” helps AI developers but leaves the training-license question open in British courts.

The case also showed that when model training happens outside the UK, rightsholders face a difficult path to copyright claims in English courts. Commentators noted this could push developers toward jurisdictions with more permissive rules. On trademarks, the ruling established that developers can be liable when models generate outputs bearing another company’s marks in a commercial context, and that filtering in later versions helped Stability limit its exposure.¹⁴

Two things worth keeping in view. The Court of Appeal could still reopen the copyright question on the storage point. And the California case, with mediation ordered and a 2028 trial date, could produce either a negotiated resolution or a separate American ruling on the same underlying dispute.

1
UK Judiciary. Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Limited, [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch)
2
Shepherd and Wedderburn. Getty Images v Stability AI: A Long Awaited Judgement That Leaves AI Stakeholders Waiting Longer
3
Latham & Watkins. Getty Images v Stability AI: English High Court Rejects Secondary Copyright Claim
4
Cleary Gottlieb. UK High Court Issues Landmark Ruling in Getty Images v Stability AI
5
DLA Piper. Getty Images v Stability AI: The UK High Court Decision
6
CMS. Getty Images v Stability AI: Permission to Appeal Sought by Getty Images at Consequentials Hearing
7
Taylor Wessing. Next Steps for Getty v Stability: Why Has Permission to Appeal Been Granted
8
ICLR. Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Ltd (Re Form of Order), [2025] EWHC 3343 (Ch)
9
BakerHostetler. Getty Images v Stability AI
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IPDE. Getty Images Voluntarily Dismisses AI Action to Re-File in N.D. Cal.
11
CourtListener. Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Ltd
12
Loeb & Loeb. Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Ltd
13
Paul Weiss. Getty Images v Stability AI: The UK Court’s First Word on Use of Copyright Works in AI Model Development
14
Mayer Brown. Getty Images v Stability AI: What the High Court’s Decision Means for Rights Holders and AI Developers