Publishing giant Getty Images is challenging a legal ruling after a court dismissed its core legal argument in a case against a London-based AI firm.

Getty Images sued Stability AI, whose directors include filmmaker James Cameron behind the Oscar-winning Avatar film series, alleging it unlawfully copied and processed millions of copyrighted images to train its image-generation technology.

The publishing giant alleged that the AI firm infringed its intellectual property rights by training Stability’s image-generation AI model, Stable Diffusion, in the US, but the High Court sided mostly with Stability AI in a judgment last November.

The parties are now at the Court of Appeal, as Getty Images asks the court to interpret a narrow definition of secondary copyright infringement and whether an AI model which was trained overseas on copyrighted images can legally be classed as an ‘infringing copy’ when imported to the UK, even if the model does not store copies of the images.

Getty’s barrister, in her arguments heard on Wednesday, said the photo giant has “a very sophisticated database” of images, which “makes its content very desirable for use in connection to training AI models”, adding that Stability “doesn’t think it should have to pay” for this content.

In its skeleton argument, the AI firm focused on the fact the images were downloaded and stored in data centres outside the UK, meaning UK copyright law does not apply.

Getty’s barrister said through this argument Stability AI “wants to divorce what was done with the copyright works from the act of the model training, but it can only do that by mischaracterising the facts.”

The case, heard at the High Court in June 2025, saw Getty Images drop one of its primary copyright infringement claims just two weeks into the trial.

The arguments that remained before Mrs Justice Joanna Smith were Getty Images’ secondary infringement claim, along with trademark infringement and passing off. However, the court ruled that Getty Images succeeded in part on its trademark infringement claim, but only for older models and on isolated examples.

The appeal is being heard between Wednesday and Thursday.

Getty Images declined to comment. Stability AI was approached for comment.

Getty’s plans to go private

Getty Images filed for US bankruptcy last month as it moves ahead with restructuring plans to go private.

The US firm had plans for a $3.7bn merger with rival firm Shutterstock, which it abandoned in July after scrutiny from the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).