Make Images Sue AI Stability For Violation Of Copyright

Getty Images sued the owner of the AI Stable Diffusion art tool for copyright infringement. (Photo: Screenshot of Website Getty Images / Citra).

JAKARTA - One of the strong players in the stock image market, Getty Images sued the owner of the AI Stable Diffusion art equipment for copyright infringement.

The lawsuit was filed by the company on January 17 yesterday for AI Stability, the maker of Stable Diffusion in London's court, England. In its filing, it claims that AI's stability violates copyright owned or represented by Getty Images.

"The position of Getty Images that AI Stabilities illegally copy and process millions of images protected by copyright and associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images without a license to benefit commercial interests of AI Stabilities and harm content creators," he said in a statement.

Get the Images added, he believes artificial intelligence has the potential to stimulate creative efforts, and license leading technology innovators for purposes related to training artificial intelligence systems in ways that respect personal and intellectual property rights.

"(But) AI's stability is not looking for such a license from Getty Images and instead, we believe, choosing to ignore the long-standing proper licensing and legal protection options to pursue their stand-alone commercial interests," said Getty Images.

Details of the lawsuit have not been published, but Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge the demands would include copyright and site TOS violations such as web screening.

Quoted from Engadget, Wednesday, January 18, Peters also explained that the company is not seeking monetary compensation in this case, but hopes to build a favorable precedent for future litigation.

Text-to-image fabrication tools like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Midjourney don't create works of art that they produce in the same way as people do, there's no imagination as to where these ideas can come from.

Like other generative AIs, these tools are trained to do what they do using large image annotated databases.

It can be imagined that the decision to AI Stability will block AI models from using copyrighted images without a license, either forcing AI stabilities and other developers to pay licensing fees, or simply removing copyrighted images from their training models.