Getty won permission to appeal the UK ruling that Stable Diffusion is not an infringing copy

Getty Images has permission to take the central question of its United Kingdom case against Stability AI to the Court of Appeal. Getty Images (US) Inc and others v Stability AI Ltd (Re Form of Order), neutral citation [2025] EWHC 3343 (Ch), case number IL-2023-000007, was handed down by Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE on 16 December 2025, and the National Archives Find Case Law service lists it under that date.

On the substance, Getty was granted permission to appeal on all grounds of its secondary copyright infringement claim. Stability AI's application for permission to appeal the trade mark findings against it was refused. The judge held that the secondary infringement question raised "a pure question of law, namely a matter of statutory construction on which the minds of reasonable lawyers may differ", and that it carried "far-reaching ramifications for AI models and intangible articles such as software". She rejected Stability's grounds on the average consumer analysis in relation to watermarks and on the factual findings about UK activity, holding they had no real prospect of success.

The question going to the Court of Appeal is narrow and consequential. Sections 22 and 23 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 make it an infringement to import, possess or deal in an "infringing copy" of a copyright work, and section 27(3) extends that to an article whose making in the United Kingdom would have constituted an infringement. Getty argued that Stable Diffusion is such an article. The trial judge rejected that, holding that the article must actually contain the works, and that the model does not.

That conclusion came in the main trial judgment, [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), handed down by the same judge on 4 November 2025. By the end of trial Getty had abandoned most of its case. The training and development claim went because there was no evidence the training had occurred in the United Kingdom. The output claim went because prompts producing infringing material had been blocked. The database right claim fell away with them. What survived to judgment on the copyright side was the secondary infringement argument, and it failed on the meaning of two words. The judgment records that the model itself does not store training data, and that model weights are learnable parameters shaped through training rather than copies of the images used to shape them.

Getty did win something. On the trade mark side the court found that Stable Diffusion may be used to generate synthetic images including the marks in the form of Getty Images watermarks, and made findings of trade mark infringement against Stability. Wiggin LLP records those findings simply as a ruling that Stability had infringed Getty's trade marks, and records that Stability sought permission to appeal them and did not get it. The judgment also considered who released those versions, finding that initial distribution of the v1.x models ran through CompVis on its own Hugging Face and GitHub pages, although Stability had funded the development and promoted the launch.

Secondary accounts of the case are not reliable on detail. An analysis published by Chambers and Partners on 20 January 2026 correctly dates the grant of permission to 16 December 2025, but describes it as permission to appeal a judgment "in November 2024". The main judgment was handed down on 4 November 2025, a year later than that. Oliver Fairhurst wrote the permission decision up on the IPKat on 7 January 2026, placing the hearing in December 2025 and citing the neutral citation correctly. Wiggin LLP published its note on 19 January 2026 and gives no date for either ruling. Those January dates are when the commentary appeared, not when anything was decided.

The stakes are practical. If the Court of Appeal holds that a set of model weights can be an infringing copy for the purposes of sections 22 and 23, then a model trained lawfully or unlawfully outside the United Kingdom becomes exposed to UK copyright liability at the point it is imported or offered here, without the claimant having to prove anything about where or how the training happened. That is precisely the proof problem that sank Getty's primary case. If the Court of Appeal upholds Mrs Justice Smith, training conducted offshore stays outside the reach of UK copyright law.

No hearing date for the appeal appears in the sources reviewed here, and none of them states whether Getty is pursuing all the grounds for which permission was granted.