U.K. High Court Issues First Major Ruling on Generative AI and IP

On November 4, 2025, the U.K. High Court issued its highly anticipated decision in Getty Images (US) Inc. v. Stability AI Ltd., marking the first time a U.K. court has examined the inner workings of a generative AI model. Getty Images had sued Stability AI in the U.K. for copyright infringement and forms of trademark infringement based on Stability AI’s use of Getty content to train its AI.

The court found that the model itself did not reproduce the asserted works and found limited trademark infringement due to reproduction of the Getty Images watermark on a small number of photos but otherwise dismissed the trademark claims.

Getty abandoned its primary copyright claims at the end of trial because the model had not been trained on the asserted works. This causes the judgment to be interesting but of limited use going forward due to that limitation.

Copyright Infringement

A critical issue for some types of AI models, such as LLMs, is whether the training of the model by use of the images is, in and of itself, copyright infringement.

The judge disagreed with Getty’s secondary copyright arguments regarding “importation of an article,” holding that an article which is an “infringing copy” must have at some point in time consisted of, contained or stored a copy of a copyright work, which was not the case here. The judge therefore dismissed Getty’s secondary infringement claim.

Global Data Problem

This case faced some geographical challenges. The training of Stable Diffusion took place abroad, largely using open datasets like LAION-5B, a massive globally sourced collection of online images. Getty argued that the process amounted to U.K. copyright, but the court found that copyright law remains territorial. Acts that occur outside the U.K. fall beyond the statute’s reach, even if their effects are felt domestically.

Looking Ahead

Getty has established the first framework for AI-related IP litigation in the UK. The court’s analysis of model architecture, data sourcing and trademark use provides a foundation for future cases.

Getty’s case was hobbled by the withdrawal of the primary copyright claim, which will need to be revisited in future litigation.

Please contact the authors or a member of the Intellectual Property Group at Aird & Berlis LLP if you have any questions or require assistance in regard to copyright infringement.