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Joanna Smith J grants Getty permission to take the 'infringing copy' question about Stable Diffusion to the Court of Appeal, and refuses Stability permission to appeal the trademark findings

At a consequentials hearing on Dec. 16, 2025, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith granted Getty Images permission to appeal her Nov. 4, 2025 dismissal of the secondary copyright infringement claim, which turned on whether an AI model that does not store copies of the works used to train it can be an 'infringing copy' under sections 22, 23 and 27 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. She said the appeal has a real prospect of success because it raises "a pure question of law" on which reasonable lawyers may differ, that the point is novel and important, and and that she would not split the grounds, so permission covers all of Getty's grounds. She refused Stability AI permission to appeal her findings of trademark infringement over generated watermarks, holding that its three main grounds had no real prospect of success because two sought to reopen her factual findings on UK user activity and the third challenged her identification of the average consumer. Stability may still ask the Court of Appeal directly. No Court of Appeal decision had been published as of Oct. 17, 2026.