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Joanna Smith J rules Stable Diffusion is not an 'infringing copy' under U.K. copyright law because it stores no copies of Getty's images, and finds only limited trademark infringement over watermarks

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith's 201-page judgment of Nov. 4, 2025 went mostly Stability AI's way. Getty alleged Stability scraped millions of its photographs to train Stable Diffusion. Before closing submissions, Getty abandoned its training and development claim (no evidence that training took place in the U.K.), its outputs claim (Stability had blocked the prompts in evidence) and its database right claim. What remained was a secondary infringement claim under sections 22 and 23 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988: that the model weights are an 'infringing copy' because making them would have infringed had it happened in the U.K. The judge dismissed that claim: although an 'article' can be intangible, "an AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works" is not an infringing copy. She found Stability not liable for the v1.x models released through CompVis pages, made no finding on how many Getty images were used in training, and refused additional damages. On trademark, Getty won only on specific examples of iStock and Getty watermarks generated by v1.x and v2.x models, findings she described as historic and extremely limited in scope.