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Getty asks UK Court of Appeal to rule Stability AI's model an 'infringing copy'

Nov 11, 2026 · Gathered automatically from public sources. Not reviewed by a person.

What happened

On 11-12 November 2026, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales heard Getty Images' appeal in its copyright dispute with Stability AI, developer of the Stable Diffusion image generator. The hearing ran over two days; no judgment has been handed down yet and the court reserved its decision.

The key question is whether an AI model can be an "infringing copy" for the purposes of secondary copyright infringement under section 27(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, even though the model itself never contained copies of the works it was trained on.

The High Court's November 2025 judgment ([2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch)) largely favoured Stability AI. Getty had dropped its primary infringement claims during trial because it could not show the training took place in the UK, and pursued secondary infringement instead: that Stable Diffusion was an "infringing copy" imported into and distributed in the UK. The High Court accepted that an intangible AI model can be an "article", but held an infringing copy must be a copy, and because Stable Diffusion's weights never stored Getty's images, the model could not be one.

Getty argues on appeal that "making" a model includes training it, which involves copying images, and that the law does not require the finished model to contain copies of the works. The British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) was given permission to intervene in support of Getty, warning the High Court's approach could let developers train models offshore and bring them back into the UK. BPI also noted Getty had accepted at trial that Stable Diffusion did not contain copies of its training works, and cited two recent German cases in which the Munich court found AI models had memorised copyright works.

Stability AI argues the High Court was right: whether something is a copy depends on what is actually produced, not on how it was developed, and extending the law to models trained overseas is a matter for Parliament. Stability is also asking the Court of Appeal to overturn two findings that went against it at first instance: that an intangible model can be an "article", and that Stability AI itself imported or distributed the model in the UK. Getty disputes both points.

If Getty succeeds, AI developers could face UK copyright claims over models trained abroad on unlicensed works, even where the imported model stores no copies. If Stability AI succeeds, where a model was trained and whether it stores copies will remain central to potential claims.

Sources