England's High Court rules a trained image model is not a copy of its training pictures
Getty Images loses its remaining copyright claim against Stability AI in the first full UK trial over building an AI model.
Picture made for ABURA Bureau.
On 4 November 2025 Mrs Justice Joanna Smith handed down judgment in Getty Images v Stability AI, the first full trial in England over using copyright works to build an AI model.
The case had narrowed before the end. Getty accepted that there was no evidence the training took place in the United Kingdom, so the question of whether training here infringes was not decided. It did not argue that the model stores copies of its images. Its remaining claim was that the model, once brought into the UK, was itself an infringing copy. The court disagreed: where an AI model itself is not an infringing copy, it falls outside the rule Getty relied on. Getty won only narrow trade mark points on early versions that reproduced its watermark.
The ruling leaves the central UK question open. It also shows where the value of training data sits. Once a model is trained, the pictures are not inside it to be reclaimed. An owner's strongest position comes before training, at the point of access, under a licence agreed in advance.
