Getty Images Sued Stable Diffusion for Training on 12 Million Getty Photos Without a License. The Smoking Gun: Stable Diffusion Kept Generating a Mangled 'Getty Images' Watermark on Its Outputs. The Model Literally Learned to Sign the Evidence.

January 17 2023: Getty Images filed suit against Stability AI in the UK High Court (and later Delaware), alleging Stable Diffusion scraped and trained on 12+ million Getty-owned images without license. The headline evidence: thousands of Stable Diffusion outputs reproduced distorted but recognizable 'Getty Images' watermarks — proof the model had memorized the watermark pattern. Stability's defense centered on fair use and the claim that outputs were 'transformative.' In November 2025 a UK judge ruled in Getty's favor on trademark infringement (the watermark claim) but narrowed the copyright findings. Often cited as the most important commercial AI training-data lawsuit — the image on every slide deck about generative-AI copyright risk.