Getty Images ‘Spending Millions’ Fighting Stability AI in Court Over Copyright
Getty Images CEO Craig Peters says the company is spending “millions and millions of dollars” in its legal battle with Stability AI.
The dispute stems from a 2023 lawsuit Getty filed against Stability AI, the developer of the popular image generation model Stable Diffusion. Getty alleges that the AI firm scraped more than 12 million copyright-protected images from its platform without permission or compensation to train its model, a move the company says harms both its business and the creators it represents.
“We’re spending millions and millions of dollars in one court case,” Peters tells CNBC. “Even for a company like Getty Images, we can’t pursue all the infringements that happen in one week. We can’t pursue it because the courts are just prohibitively expensive.”
Despite the cost, Getty believes the case is essential. “We’re battling a world of rhetoric,” he says. “That’s disruption under the notion of ‘move fast and break things,’ and we believe that’s unfair competition.”
Getty accuses Stability AI of turning copyrighted content into a commercial AI product that directly competes with Getty’s core business. “They’re just turning those services right back on existing commercial markets,” Peters says. “We’re not against competition … But that’s just unfair competition, that’s theft.”
Stability AI has denied liability and argues that its training practices are legally permissible. The company acknowledges that it used images from Getty’s websites but claims that its AI creates new, non-replicative works and does not reproduce the original images. The firm has cited doctrines like “fair use” and “temporary copying” as legal defenses, maintaining that the AI’s output constitutes a transformative use of the material.
“Stability AI will be arguing that the output AI-generated does not actually reproduce the original image at all, such that it cannot be copyright infringement,” Sukanya Wadhwa, an associate at intellectual property law firm Brandsmiths, tells CNBC.
The courts must also consider where the AI training took place, this unanswered question has forced Getty to file lawsuits in the US and the UK.
“To be candid, we didn’t know where this training took place,” he says. “There are elements where we have to go through and then we’ve got to spend money for due diligence, and they resist and we’ve got to fight, and we go back and forth.”
The initial trial to determine liability in Getty’s case against Stability AI is scheduled to begin on June 9. Getty is reportedly seeking $1.7 billion in damages.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
