Getty v. Stability, explained

Getty Images sued Stability AI in the UK High Court over the training and outputs of Stable Diffusion. The November 4, 2025 judgment ([2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch)) was the first UK ruling on generative-AI training and copyright.

Why it matters to a buyer

Headlines framed this case both ways; the judgment is narrower than either framing. Getty largely lost, but not because training was ruled lawful — the training claims were never decided, because the training happened outside the UK. The operative lesson is jurisdictional: where a model is trained determines which copyright law applies, and that is a fact to establish in diligence, not assume.

Why it matters to a data owner

The case did not weaken owners’ rights over training; it showed how hard those rights are to enforce across borders. A signed licence removes the enforcement problem by putting terms on paper before anything moves.

Current legal status

UK High Court, November 4, 2025, [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch). Getty withdrew its primary training and output claims mid-trial because the training occurred outside the UK, leaving the court without jurisdiction over them. Getty lost on secondary infringement — a model that stores no copies is not an "infringing copy" under s.27 CDPA — and won only narrow trademark findings tied to watermarks in generated outputs. It is not a rights-holder win on training, and it decided nothing about whether training itself infringes. Getty was granted leave to appeal on December 16, 2025. The parallel US case, voluntarily dismissed in Delaware and refiled in the Northern District of California in August 2025 (3:25-cv-06891), continues with copyright, DMCA, and trademark claims; on April 23, 2026 the court let the trademark claims proceed while dismissing the DMCA false-CMI claim, and the copyright claim was not part of that motion.

What fiund does about it

A signed licence does not leave training rights to a jurisdictional fight. fiund papers the grant at the source, with provenance records available in diligence.

Sources

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