Getty Images takes Stability AI case to UK Court of Appeal

Getty Images asked the Court of Appeal in London on Wednesday to revive its copyright case against Stability AI, the maker of the Stable Diffusion image generator, in a two-day hearing that turns on whether an AI model trained overseas on copyrighted images can be an "infringing copy" once it reaches the UK.

The appeal, heard on Wednesday 11 and Thursday 12 November 2026, follows Getty's loss in the High Court in a judgment handed down on 4 November 2025 by Mrs Justice Joanna Smith. Getty sued Stability in the High Court in January 2023, alleging that Stability scraped millions of its images to train Stable Diffusion. Getty could not show that the training took place in the UK, which is fatal to a claim of primary copyright infringement under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It dropped its primary copyright claims two weeks into the June 2025 trial and pursued secondary infringement, trademark infringement and passing off instead, as City AM reported.

At first instance Getty won only in part. The court held that an "article" in the secondary infringement provisions is not limited to physical objects and can include software such as an AI model. It held that the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model was not an "infringing copy" under section 27 of the Act, because the model never stored a copy of Getty's works: a model is an infringing copy only if it at some point contained a copy, permanent or temporary, of the works used to train it. Getty had accepted as an agreed fact at trial that Stable Diffusion does not store its training data, Pinsent Masons explained. Getty also won part of its trademark claim, but only for versions 1.x and 2.x of the model, and on isolated examples where generated images reproduced its watermarks, World Trademark Review reported.

The appeal asks whether a model can be an "infringing copy" if it never contained a copy of the works, according to Burges Salmon's write-up of the hearing. Getty argues that "making" a model includes training it, and that the law does not require the finished model to hold a copy: if making the article in the UK would have infringed copyright, Getty says, the article is an infringing copy regardless. Getty's barrister told the court on Wednesday that the company has "a very sophisticated database" of images, which "makes its content very desirable for use in connection to training AI models", and that Stability "doesn't think it should have to pay" for it. She said Stability "wants to divorce what was done with the copyright works from the act of the model training, but it can only do that by mischaracterising the facts", City AM reported.

Stability AI says the High Court was right. Whether something is a copy depends on what is produced, not how it was developed, it argues, and Getty's reading would produce odd results, such as making it unlawful to import the model but lawful to copy it once it is in the UK. Stability also says extending the law to models trained overseas is a question for Parliament. It is cross-appealing two findings that went against it: that an intangible model can be an "article", and that Stability itself imported or distributed the model in the UK. The Intelligent reported that Stability compared Getty's position to treating a finished cake as an infringing copy of a recipe because the chef had photographed the recipe before baking.

The British Recorded Music Industry has been given permission to intervene in support of Getty. It warns that the High Court's approach could let AI developers train models overseas and bring them back into the UK. Getty Images declined to comment; Stability AI was approached for comment, City AM reported.

The appeal runs alongside US anti-circumvention cases over how AI developers obtain training data. In Ace Cam, Inc. v. Runway AI, Inc., Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York denied Runway's motion to dismiss on 30 October 2026, letting a proposed class action by YouTube creators proceed, according to the class action tracker. The creators allege Runway circumvented YouTube's technological protection measures to download their videos and train its Gen-3 model, in violation of section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. ByteDance Inc., Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California denied ByteDance's motion to dismiss a similar claim on 2 October 2026, per the court order. Both rulings let the cases move forward; neither is a finding of liability.

For creators in the UK, the appeal could decide whether a model trained on their work abroad becomes actionable once it reaches British users. A Getty win could expose developers who train overseas and distribute in the UK to secondary infringement claims. A Stability win would leave where a model is trained, and whether it stores copies of its training data, as the pivot for UK copyright claims against AI companies.

Getty Images filed for bankruptcy in the US in October 2026 as part of a restructuring to go private, after abandoning a $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock in July following scrutiny from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, City AM reported.

Judgment is reserved. The Court of Appeal will hand down its decision in writing.