Getty refiles its Stability AI suit in California after Delaware jurisdiction dispute

Getty Images voluntarily dismissed the US suit it had brought against Stability AI in Delaware in early 2023 and, the same day, filed a new complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California — the district where Stability AI is based. Stability had spent much of the intervening period arguing the Delaware court lacked personal jurisdiction over its US entity and pressing to have the case moved to California; rather than litigate that motion, Getty dropped the two-and-a-half-year-old Delaware case and started again in the venue Stability had been asking for.

The refiled complaint, case number 3:25-cv-06891, was substantially longer than the original and added a copyright-dilution theory to Getty’s existing trademark-dilution claim, alongside its core allegation that Stability trained Stable Diffusion on millions of Getty’s copyrighted photographs without permission or payment. Getty argued the unauthorised use diluted the market for licensing its own catalogue, describing Stability as taking a service Getty already sold to paying customers. The company again sought a permanent injunction against further distribution of models trained on its images.

The move was procedural rather than substantive — the underlying dispute over training-data use was unchanged — but it reset the clock on a case that had made little progress in Delaware, and put the US copyright claims in the same district as several other AI-training lawsuits, giving the court more consolidated exposure to the arguments already developing in parallel cases against other model developers.