Photobank Getty Images filed a lawsuit against the company Stability AI, which created the generative neural network Stable Diffusion, in a US court, accusing it of copyright infringement. According to the plaintiff, the developers used millions of Getty Images without permission to train their AI algorithm.
Illustration from the lawsuit showing the original photo and a similar image generated by Stable Diffusion
Stability AI is accused of “blatant copyright infringement of Getty Images on a mind-boggling scale.” The lawsuit alleges that the developers of the Stable Diffusion algorithm copied more than 12 million images from the Getty Images database “without permission or compensation,” which is copyright infringement.
This lawsuit is another clash between developers of generative neural networks and copyright holders. The fact is that training such algorithms requires a huge number of images, which are often taken from the Internet without the consent of the authors and copyright holders. Last month, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI in a British court, accusing the developers of copyright infringement.
Legal experts say the Getty Images case has a solid foundation, but say it’s difficult to predict the outcome of the confrontation because there have been no such cases in the past. British scientist Andres Guadamaz, who specializes in artificial intelligence and copyright, believes that the Getty Images lawsuit is well founded. He noted that, most likely, the case will be considered from the point of view of copyright infringement, and the defendant will try to prove that he used the images of the service in good faith and did not violate the rights of the authors.
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