Dr Barry Scannell and Leo Moore

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE handed down her long-awaited 205-page ruling in Getty Images v. Stability AI [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) on Tuesday.

Her judgment “will reverbate through courtrooms and boardrooms for years to come”, Dr Scannell and Leo Moore write in an article for William Fry’s website.

“The case, Getty Images v Stability AI, began with sweeping allegations that an AI company had committed wholesale copyright infringement on a staggering scale. It ended with a ruling that may fundamentally reshape our understanding of what an AI model actually is under the law,” they say.

“Getty Images, one of the world’s largest visual content libraries, alleged that Stability AI had trained its Stable Diffusion image-generation model on millions of Getty’s copyrighted photographs.

“When Stable Diffusion was released publicly by Stability, a model card was published, stating that the model was a latent diffusion model that utilised a fixed, pre-trained text encoder trained on a large-scale dataset of nearly six billion image URLs, known as LAION-5B.

“By the time the judgment was handed down, Getty had abandoned most of its claims. What remained was a narrow dispute over trade mark infringement and a novel legal theory that sought to apply decades-old copyright concepts, designed initially to combat bootleg VHS tapes sold at flea markets, to the cutting edge of machine learning technology.

“The court’s conclusion was unequivocal. Model weights, the mathematical parameters that constitute the essence of an AI system, are not copies of training data. They store nothing. They reproduce nothing. They are, in the judge’s words, ‘purely the product of the patterns and features which they have learnt over time during the training process’.”

Their full analysis of the judgment and its implications can be found on the William Fry website.