A stock agency counts twelve million photographs
On 3 February 2023 Getty Images sued Stability AI in the District of Delaware, case 1:23-cv-00135. The first paragraph of the complaint gives the number: more than 12 million photographs from the Getty collection copied along with their captions and metadata. The suit separately alleges that Stable Diffusion reproduces a distorted Getty watermark, and adds trademark claims.
Why it matters
Until then the plaintiffs had been authors estimating how much had been taken. Here a party with its own inventory stood against a model's maker for the first time: not billions of images off the web, but a counted quantity of one rightsholder's licensed work. A watermark in the model's output became evidence of copying that needs no expert to see.
The original complaint names only Stability AI, Inc. as defendant; the amended complaint of 29 March 2023, filed as document 13, adds Stability AI, Ltd. of the United Kingdom. A table in the complaint lists eight registered Getty Images trademarks from 2002 to 2017. Section E describes attempts to circumvent the Getty watermarks. What happened next (from the documents). Getty voluntarily dismissed the Delaware case on 14 August 2025 without prejudice (as the California court's order, document 53, says in its procedural history) and filed in the Northern District of California, case 3:25-cv-06891 (Judge Trina Thompson). On 23 April 2026 the court granted in part and denied in part the motion to dismiss: the claim of false copyright management information (17 U.S.C. 1202(a) of the DMCA, Count II) was dismissed without prejudice, with leave to amend by 7 May 2026; the trademark, unfair competition and dilution claims remained; the copyright claim (Count I) was not challenged by the motion. By the docket, fact discovery closes on 20 November 2026 and dispositive motions are due by 7 May 2027. London. On 4 November 2025 Mrs Justice Joanna Smith gave judgment, [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch): in her conclusion 'The Secondary Infringement Claim fails', and she calls Getty's success on trade marks 'both historic and extremely limited in scope' — infringement of the iStock marks by watermarks that users of v1.x models generated through DreamStudio and the Developer Platform; the claim under section 10(1) about Getty Images watermarks failed. Whether an appeal was filed was not found in the documents read. What the record does not claim. Of the English judgment only the cover and the conclusion were read; the other sections were not.