Report from Reuters
In Brief – A London High Court ruling has handed a victory to artificial intelligence firm Stability AI in a closely watched case testing whether copyrighted material can legally be used to train AI models without the authorization of the copyright holder. US-based Getty Images sued Stability, which is based in London, alleging the company had infringed its copyrights and trademarks by scraping and using millions of its photos to train the Stable Diffusion image-generation model. Getty argued that the model’s creation itself amounted to infringement. Justice Joanna Smith ruled that because Stability’s AI model does not store or reproduce copyrighted works, it is not itself an “infringing copy.” The decision did not rule specifically on whether training was a copyright violation because it could not be determined that Stability trained its model in the UK. The court did uphold some trademark violation claims by Getty because some images generated by Stable Diffusion included Getty watermarks. Legal observers described the decision as a setback for rights holders, with Stability AI’s general counsel saying that the decision “ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue”.
Context – A series of lawsuits in US courts, including some involving Stability AI, will likely have the greatest impact in determining if training generative AI models, both for chatbots and for image generation, violates copyright law. There were a pair of dueling decisions from US District judges in June on the key “fair use” question in chatbot copyright cases, one defended training as fair use while the other rejected fair use claims. In the EU, the AI Act, regulators and expert groups are playing central roles, with the copyright section of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice proving contentious. In the UK and Australia, proposals to make national copyright law more conducive to AI training have resulted in considerable pushback from creative industries, while in Japan, which has a copyright exception for AI training considered to be very pro-industry, creative industries are pushing the government to tighten the AI training exception.