Decided in part — UK Active in U.S.

Getty Images v. Stability AI

A dual-front fight: a six-week UK High Court trial in 2025 and a parallel Delaware federal action over the training and outputs of Stable Diffusion.

🏛️ UK High Court (Chancery)· D. Del. (parallel U.S. action)· Filed Jan-Feb 2023

Case summary

Plaintiff
Getty Images (US), Inc. and Getty Images International
Defendant
Stability AI Ltd. (UK) and Stability AI, Inc. (Delaware)
Courts
UK High Court of Justice (Chancery Division) · U.S. District Court, District of Delaware
Filed
January 17, 2023 (UK); February 3, 2023 (D. Del.)
Trial
June–July 2025 (UK), six weeks before Mrs Justice Joanna Smith
UK ruling
November 2025 — secondary copyright claim rejected; trademark infringement found on watermark reproduction
U.S. status
Active; summary judgment briefing
Claim types
Copyright infringement · database right · trademark · passing off · §1202 (U.S.)

TL;DR

Getty alleged Stability scraped roughly 12 million Getty-licensed images to train Stable Diffusion. The UK case narrowed sharply at trial: the court rejected the theory that Stable Diffusion's model weights are themselves "infringing copies" of the training images stored in the UK, and dismissed the secondary-copyright claim. But the court found Stability liable for trademark infringement and passing off because Stable Diffusion's outputs reproduced recognizable Getty and iStock watermarks.

The Delaware action remains active and broader: it advances direct copyright infringement, DMCA §1202 (removal of copyright-management information), and trademark claims on the U.S. record. Summary-judgment briefing is underway.

Why it matters

  • The "model weights are infringing copies" theory failed in the UK. The court held weights are not themselves copies of the training images. That ruling will be cited by every defendant facing a similar theory.
  • Trademark survives where copyright did not. Stable Diffusion's reproduction of Getty's watermarks gave the court a clean trademark/passing-off basis to find liability — a roadmap for rights holders whose marks are visible on training data.
  • Territorial scope matters. The UK court's reluctance to find UK-located infringement based on extraterritorial training shifts strategic value to forums where training itself occurred.
  • The Delaware case is the next test. A U.S. summary-judgment ruling on §1202 and direct infringement will bear on every image-generation case.

More to come

Full Delaware docket tracker, the UK appellate posture, and a side-by-side of the U.S. and UK holdings coming soon. Sign up for ruling alerts to be notified when the Delaware summary-judgment opinion drops.