Getty’s procès-verbal d’image contre Stability AI se tiendra au Royaume-Uni

Getty’s lawsuit claiming that the startup Stability AI « unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright » from its photo archive will go to trial in the UK. In January, Getty sued Stability and accused it of infringing upon the photo library’s intellectual property rights and copyright protections by scraping its images without permission. Judges from the High Court of Justice in London believe that both sides should be given a chance to present evidence and arguments in court to resolve the issue. These images were, it’s claimed, used in datasets that helped train Stable Diffusion models. Getty believes Stability has avoided paying licenses to use its images, and instead unfairly profits off content creators. While Stability hasn’t explicitly denied scraping the images, it believes the case is moot since the training process was completed using resources obtained outside of the UK. The datasets used to train its model were seemingly compiled by LAION, a non-profit organization registered in Germany. Meanwhile, the hardware used to crunch the numbers during the process were from AWS servers in the US. CEO Emad Mostaque also claimed that none of the developers working to develop the models were based in the UK. But the High Court judges aren’t entirely convinced. « Having examined with care all the evidence before the court, I am not so satisfied, » justice Joanna Smith ruled in court documents [PDF]. Smith reckoned that there were still some « unanswered questions » and « inconsistencies » in Stability’s arguments, and that Getty’s claims may hold up in court.