United Kingdom: High Court ruled that Stability AI partially infringed Getty Images' trademarks

On 4 November 2025, the High Court of Justice in England and Wales ruled that Stability AI had partially infringed Getty Images’ ISTOCK and GETTY IMAGES trademarks. The Court found that synthetic watermark images produced by Stable Diffusion version 1.x (used through DreamStudio and the Developer Platform) breached the ISTOCK trademark, and that a few examples from version 2.1 infringed the GETTY IMAGES mark. However, the Court dismissed the rest of Getty’s trademark claims, including those related to versions 1.6 and SD XL, and made no separate ruling on passing off. It also rejected the secondary copyright claim, stating that the Stable Diffusion models were not “infringing copies” under UK copyright law, so Stability AI was not liable for copyright infringement. The Court further clarified that Stability AI was not responsible for models shared on CompVis GitHub or Hugging Face, and noted that Getty Images had withdrawn earlier claims about model training, output generation, and database rights.