Getty Images Proved Trademark Breach Despite Losing Landmark Lawsuit Against Stability AI

In Focus

• Getty Images has lost most of its lawsuit against Stability AI
• The ruling was made by a High Court in London
• Stability AI had been sued for trademark and copyright infringement

Getty Images has lost its landmark lawsuit against AI company Stability AI, Yahoo Finance reported. The case was heard by London’s High Court and was followed closely by professionals working in the creative and tech industries.

Getty’s Case Against Stability AI

The U.S.-based company had sued Stability AI for trademark and copyright infringement. In its filing, Getty Images had claimed that Stability AI’s image generator, Stable Diffusion, trained on Getty’s vast library without permission.

The company also accused Stability AI of trademark infringement in AI-generated images, claiming that the image generator reproduced Getty’s copyrighted images.

Stable Diffusion is designed to generate images from text prompts. Stability AI denied Getty’s claims of copyright breach, saying that its AI tools are designed to foster innovation and artistic freedom.

Getty’s AI model liability for copyrighted material ruling comes days after the company signed a licensing deal with Perplexity.

Getty Dropped AI Training Claim

Getty Images, which produces creative stock videos and images along with editorial content, dropped the AI training claim mid-trial. This move was informed by the fact that the Seattle-based firm lacked evidence of where Stability AI trained its image generator.

According to intellectual property lawyers, this information gap had the potential to limit the wider impact of the ruling made on Stability AI’s image generator legal case.

Getty Images’ claim that Stability AI imported an AI model into the U.K. that breached its copyright was maintained by the court.

In a written ruling, presiding Judge Joanna Smith said Getty Images had succeeded partly in its trademark infringement claim. Judge Smith acknowledged that her findings were historic but also said their scope was extremely limited. The court did not rule in favor of the secondary copyright infringement claim, though it acknowledged it.

Getty Images is among publishers who have taken legal action against AI firms. Last year, publishers in New York sued Perplexity for copyright infringement.

A Sneak Preview of Getty Images’ Landmark Lawsuit

• Getty dropped AI training allegations for lack of evidence
• The company had proven trademark infringement claim partly
• Getty had filed a parallel lawsuit in the U.S.

Getty Images’ Reaction to Ruling

In response to the ruling, Getty Images said it had confirmed that Stability AI’s use of watermarked images in its outputs amounted to trademark infringement.

The U.S. company further said that the ruling had “established a powerful precedent that intangible articles, such as AI models, are subject to copyright infringement claims in the same way as tangible articles.”

Getty Images plans to use this precedent against Stability AI in the U.S., where it had filed a parallel lawsuit against the AI firm. Getty Images stock dipped 3.6% in pre-market trading on November 4, 2025.