Artists Score Win Against AI Firms in Training Data Copyright Case

A judge has granted a group of artists the right to continue their copyright claims against four AI image generator companies.

The makers of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, are being sued along with Midjourney, Runway, and DeviantArt by 10 artists (including one photographer) for using their work to build AI image products without permission.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled on Monday that it is plausible the companies violated the artists’ rights by illegally storing copies of their work on their systems.

The federal judge in California did throw out some of the other claims brought by the artists including unjust enrichment, breach of contract, and breaking a separate U.S. copyright law.

It is not a final judgment but by allowing the core claims of the case to continue it means the issue of whether using copyrighted material to train AI systems is fair use or not can be be heard in court.

The artists and their lawyers now move to discovery allowing them to ask for information from the AI companies about how exactly they use copyrighted material.

“Very exciting news on the AI lawsuit!” writes one of the plaintiffs Kelly McKernan on X. “The judge is allowing our copyright claims through and now we get to find out allll the things these companies don’t want us to know in Discovery. This is a HUGE win for us.”

The artists’ attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick says the decision is “a significant step forward for the case.”

Brief History of the Case

The case was initially brought by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz in January 2023 and many of the claims were dismissed in October that year.

However, Judge Orrick did allow the plaintiffs to amend their claims and this latest ruling is good news for the artists who have now grown to 10 — including photographer Jingna Zhang.

The lawsuit mainly revolves around the LAION dataset — an archive of five billion images allegedly scraped from the open web and utilized by Stability AI.

Midjourney used Stable Diffusion to build its AI image generator while Runway was the original startup behind the AI image generator.

DeviantArt is an interesting outlier in this case as it did not build its own AI model. Instead, it offered a version of Stable Diffusion called DreamUp on its website. DeviantArt has argued that many other companies will be sued if the claims against them are not dismissed.

“The havoc that would be wreaked by allowing this to proceed against DeviantArt is hard to state,” said a lawyer for the company, Andy Gass, at a hearing in May, per The Hollywood Reporter.

“Here, we really have an innumerable number of parties no differently situated than [us] that would be subject to a claim.”

Gass said that DeviantArt didn’t develop any gen AI models and that “all [it’s] alleged to have done is take StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion model, download it, upload it, and offer a version DreamUp to users.”