by Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper, 14 August 2024
A federal judge in California has blocked an attempt by several AI companies to have portions of a copyright case dismissed
As the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright continues to develop in the legal sphere, a group of visual artists have scored a small victory in court. On 12 August, US District Judge William Orrick ruled that the companies Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI were violating artists’ rights by illegally storing their works in their image generation systems.
While Orrick refused to dismiss trademark claims related to the matter, he threw out accusations of unjust enrichment and breach of contract, in addition to allegations that the companies’ behaviours were in violation of a second US copyright law, Reuters reported.
The plaintiffs—illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz—first sued the AI companies in January 2023 in a landmark lawsuit against tech companies engaging in AI training. Judge Orrick dismissed most of their allegations last October, but allowed the artists to re-file. The original three plaintiffs, along with seven others who joined the lawsuit, returned with amendments in November, arguing that Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion model, which all the companies used, unlawfully contained “compressed copies” of their artwork.