As the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright continues to develop in the legal sphere, a group of visual artists have scored a small victory in court. On 12 August, US District Judge William Orrick ruled that the companies Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI were violating artists’ rights by illegally storing their works in their image generation systems.
While Orrick refused to dismiss trademark claims related to the matter, he threw out accusations of unjust enrichment and breach of contract, in addition to allegations that the companies’ behaviours were in violation of a second US copyright law, Reuters reported.
The plaintiffs—illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz—first sued the AI companies in January 2023 in a landmark lawsuit against tech companies engaging in AI training. Judge Orrick dismissed most of their allegations last October, but allowed the artists to re-file. The original three plaintiffs, along with seven others who joined the lawsuit, returned with amendments in November, arguing that Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion model, which all the companies used, unlawfully contained “compressed copies” of their artwork.
In May, Judge Orrick decided in a tentative ruling to allow the copyright allegations to continue.
“The plausible inferences at this juncture are that Stable Diffusion by operation by end users creates copyright infringement and was created to facilitate that infringement by design,” Judge Orrick said.
This week’s ruling did not take on the central points of contention in the case—that the artists’ work was used to train AI systems in violation of their copyright. The AI companies claimed fair use, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims were ultimately dismissed with prejudice.
Lawyers for artists, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick of Saveri Law Firm, called the decision “a significant step forward for the case” in a statement.
Judge Orrick’s ruling was delivered before a court hearing that was scheduled for today (14 August).
