Organisation
Getty Images
Getty Images, a large stock-photography company that in this record features mainly as the rightsholder suing image generators, most prominently Stability AI in the US and UK.
Getty Images is a large stock-photography and visual-media company, and in this record it features chiefly as a copyright litigant. In early 2023 it became one of the first and most prominent rightsholders to sue an AI image generator, filing cases in both the United States and the United Kingdom against Stability AI, whose Stable Diffusion model it said had been trained on millions of Getty photographs — some outputs even reproducing a distorted Getty watermark. The UK case produced the country's first substantive ruling on AI training and copyright in November 2025: the High Court largely rejected Getty's claims, holding that a model's weights are not a "copy" of the images, after Getty had dropped its central copyright claim mid-trial because the training took place on servers abroad. Getty won only a narrow trademark point over the watermark, was granted permission to appeal in early 2026, and has separately refiled its US case in California.
- Category
- Media & rightsholders
- Founded
- 1995
- HQ
- Seattle, US
- Key people
- Craig Peters
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Courts & copyright 4
UK court grants Getty permission to appeal Stability AI ruling
Getty's appeal turns on whether Stable Diffusion is an 'infringing copy' under UK copyright law even though no training image is stored in its weights.
Courts & copyright
UK High Court largely rejects Getty's copyright claims against Stability AI
The court held that Stable Diffusion's trained weights are not a 'copy' of Getty's photographs under UK law; Getty had already dropped its main copyright claim mid-trial.
Courts & copyright
Getty refiles its Stability AI suit in California after Delaware jurisdiction dispute
Getty voluntarily dropped the Delaware case it had run since 2023 and filed a new, longer complaint in the Northern District of California, adding a copyright-dilution claim.
Courts & copyright
Getty Images sues Stability AI
Getty's UK High Court claim alleged around 11 million of its images were used to train Stable Diffusion without a licence; a separate US suit followed in February.
Courts & copyright
Also mentioned in 4 entries
Referenced in passing — Getty Images isn't the main subject of these.