Source: JD Supra

JD Supra provides a detailed analysis of the landmark judgment delivered by the High Court of Justice in London on December 15, 2025, regarding the high-profile copyright dispute between Getty Images and Stability AI. The court ruled in favor of the defendant, Stability AI, rejecting Getty's assertion that the ingestion of millions of copyrighted images to train the Stable Diffusion model constituted copyright infringement under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The judge accepted the argument that the "training" process, which involves breaking down images into noise and mathematical patterns, does not amount to a reproduction of the substantial part of the original artistic works in a manner prohibited by current statutes.

The summary explains that the court placed significant weight on the distinction between the technical act of data mining for model conditioning and the actual generation of competing outputs. The ruling clarifies that unless the AI produces an output that is substantially similar to a specific training image (overfitting), the underlying model weights are not infringing derivatives. This decision provides a significant boost to the UK's AI sector, establishing a more permissive legal environment for model developers compared to pending litigations in other jurisdictions, while leaving rights holders with limited recourse under existing copyright frameworks.