AI companies Fail to Dismiss Key Parts of Visual Artists’ Copyright Lawsuit

Another court in California said that visual artists can keep suing Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, saying that their AI systems violate copyrights by using the artists’ work without permission.

An appeals court in California ruled on Monday that a group of visual artists can keep pursuing some claims that Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI’s AI-based image generation systems violate their copyrights.

Judge William Orrick of the U.S. District Court said it was reasonable for the artists to say that the companies were breaking their rights by illegally keeping their works on their systems.

Other claims against the companies included unfair enrichment, breach of contract, and breaking a different U.S. copyright law, but Orrick refused to throw out the trademark law claims.

The decision did not address the artists’ claim that the alleged misuse of their work to train AI systems directly violates their copyrights. It also did not address the main defense that AI companies fairly use copyrighted material.

On Tuesday, a representative for Stability wouldn’t say anything about the decision. When asked for comments, lawyers and spokespeople for the artists and other companies did not respond right away. That was the first of several high-stakes lawsuits against tech companies over using copyrighted work in AI training.

The illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz sued the companies in January. In October, Orrick threw out many of their claims, but they were allowed to be filed again.

Artists Allege Copyright Infringement in Stability’s AI Model

In November, Andersen, McKernan, Ortiz, and seven other artists filed a new complaint. They claimed that all the companies were utilizing illegal “compressed copies” of their works to train Stability’s Stable Diffusion model.

In May, Orrick said, in a possible decision, that he was leaning towards letting the copyright claims go on. On Monday, he said that the companies could not throw out the claims so early in the case. “The plausible inferences at this juncture are that stable diffusion by operation by end users created copyright infringement and was created to facilitate that infringement by design,” said Orrick.