Getty Images sued Stability AI in the US District Court for Delaware, alleging that it had copied and processed 12 million Getty images together with their captions and metadata, without a licence, to train Stable Diffusion. Getty said the company had "chosen to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in pursuit of their standalone commercial interests." Where the artists' class action the previous month was about individual works, this came from a business built on licensing images, and its argument was that a licensing route existed and was not taken. The dispute over training data now ran across rights holders of every size.
2February 2023
Getty Images sues Stability AI over 12 million images
The filing and its claims are consistent across multiple reports, but the exact day could not be pinned down, so this is recorded at month precision. It was early February 2023, and Getty brought a separate action in the United Kingdom as well.