On 4 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales delivered its decision in the long-awaited case between Getty Images and Stability AI (concerning the latter’s image-generation model Stable Diffusion), marking the first major UK judgment on whether the use of copyrighted visual works to train a generative AI model constitutes copyright infringement.
What was at stake
Getty had advanced a multi-pronged claim: primary copyright infringement, database-right infringement, secondary copyright infringement, trade mark infringement (relating to watermarks), and passing off. However, prior to judgment the primary copyright and database-right claims were withdrawn — Getty accepted it could not show that the relevant acts of reproduction or storage had occurred within the UK jurisdiction, and that Stability AI ensured that the prompts which were generating infringing outputs were blocked (at para. 9). As a result, the Court was asked only to decide on secondary copyright claims (whether the AI model itself is an “infringing copy” under UK law) and the related trade mark/passing off claims.
The Court’s reasoning and outcome
On copyright, Justice Joanna Smith DBE found that the statutory term “article” under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) can, as a matter of construction, embrace intangible objects (e.g., electronic storage, cloud-based artifacts) with reference to s.17 of the CDPA (please see the approach to statutory construction in para 562), highlighting that:
‘I consider that an article, which must be an infringing copy, is capable of being an electronic copy stored in intangible form. Standing back, I agree with Getty Images that if the word “article” were construed as only covering tangible articles, this would deprive authors of protection in circumstances where the copy is itself electronic and it is then dealt with electronically. Not only would that be inconsistent with the words of the statute, but it would also be inconsistent with the general scheme of copyright protection which is to reward authors for their creative efforts’ (para 590).