Artists sue the image generators
On 13 January 2023 Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz filed a class action against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, case 3:23-cv-00201. The complaint says Stability paid LAION to assemble LAION-5B, a set of 5.85 billion captioned images, trained Stable Diffusion on it, and that the images the model produces are derivative works of the art that entered the set without permission.
Why it matters
This is the first suit in which artists as a class stood against an image generator. It moved the dispute from code to drawing and raised a question the Copilot suit had not: whether the model's output is itself a derivative work, and not only the way the model was trained.
Four defendants are named: Stability AI Ltd. of the United Kingdom, Stability AI, Inc. of Delaware, Midjourney, Inc. and DeviantArt, Inc. Paragraph 104 names LAION-5B and its 5.85 billion training images; paragraph 57 says over five billion images were copied. Paragraph 60 records the October 2022 raise of 100 million dollars led by Coatue and Lightspeed at a Stability valuation of about one billion. What happened next (from the court's documents). On 12 August 2024 Judge William Orrick (document 223) dismissed the DMCA claims with prejudice, the unjust enrichment claims with leave to amend, and the breach of contract claims against DeviantArt with prejudice; he denied the defendants' motions on the Copyright Act claims, and Midjourney's motion on the Lanham Act claims. So the copyright claims, including those about DreamUp and Midjourney, survived the motions to dismiss. On 28 September 2026 the court (document 764) extended the schedule: dispositive motions and the class certification hearing to be heard by 29 September 2027. The docket on 13 October 2026 shows disputes over discovery, including a motion for sanctions against DeviantArt; there is no ruling on the merits. What the record does not claim. Later changes of parties, including the addition of Runway AI in November 2023, are outside this record.