UK High Court removes Getty's class representative in Stability AI copyright dispute

What happened

Mrs Justice Joanna Smith removed photographer Thomas Barwick's company as representative claimant for the 50,000-plus Getty-contributor photographers in the UK copyright dispute with Stability AI.

The ruling

The judge found the court could not be satisfied that any person qualified as a class member, because the works used to train Stable Diffusion cannot be identified; she accepted Stability AI's argument that the putative class lacked a same interest.

Status

A court ruling on the representative-claim issue; it is a procedural setback for the claimants, not a ruling on the merits of the training-data infringement claim.