Artists involved in a copyright dispute with generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies encountered a legal setback as a U.S. judge dismissed a class action lawsuit against several firms due to a lack of evidence.
In an order dated October 30, Judge William Orrick of the California District Court ruled that the copyright infringement lawsuit against generative AI imaging service Midjourney, art platform DeviantArt, and AI company Stability AI was "deficient in many respects" and therefore dismissed. The companies had previously sought the dismissal of the lawsuit.
However, Judge Orrick allowed one class member's copyright infringement claim against Stability to proceed and granted the class 30 days to attempt to file an amended lawsuit with more substantiating evidence. Orrick stated, "Even Stability acknowledges that the veracity of these allegations—whether there was copyright law violation through copying during Stable Diffusion training or while Stable Diffusion was in operation—cannot be verified. It's being addressed at this moment."
The initial lawsuit, filed in mid-January, contended that Stability's AI model, Stable Diffusion, scraped billions of copyrighted images, including those of artists, without authorization for the purpose of training the software.
The suit also alleged that DeviantArt had incorporated Stable Diffusion into its website, possibly copying millions of images from the site without consent, thus violating its own terms of service. Orrick remarked that AI-generated images may not infringe on artists' copyrights because they are "unlikely" to originate from copyrighted images. He indicated that he would need convincing proof that the generated images closely resembled the artists' work.
Some class members had their copyright claims dismissed due to their images not being registered with the Copyright Office, which is a prerequisite for initiating a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Allegations of copyright infringement have become central to similar legal actions against AI companies, including lawsuits by the Writers Guild of America and a UK class action against OpenAI, as well as Universal Music Group's lawsuit against Anthropic and Getty Images' lawsuit against Stability AI.
