Getty Images has told the Court of Appeal in London that Stability AI's image-generation model can count as an "infringing copy" of its photographs, even though the model does not itself contain the pictures used to train it. The appeal was heard on Wednesday 11 November 2026, and it is one of the most closely watched copyright cases in the UK. Getty is asking the court to overturn a High Court decision from last year, when it failed to persuade the judge that Stability AI was liable for infringing its copyright in the UK. The company believes Stability AI trained its Stable Diffusion system using its copyrighted images without permission. Getty has said around 11 million of its protected works were used to train the system from around August 2022. ## What the appeal is really about The case now turns on secondary copyright infringement, under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Those provisions deal with importing, possessing, marketing, selling or distributing an "article" that features an "infringing copy" of a copyright work. Getty argues that Stable Diffusion itself is such an article. The High Court judge, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith, accepted that an "article" could include software such as an AI model, and not only physical objects such as books. But she ruled that an article could only be an "infringing copy" if it had at some point contained a copy of the copyright works used to train it. Getty had agreed during the trial, as a fact between the parties, that Stable Diffusion does not itself store the data it was trained on. On that basis, the judge found there could be no infringing copy inside the model. Getty is expected to argue on appeal that this reading of the law is wrong, and that secondary infringement can be shown if training the model would have amounted to copyright infringement had it taken place in the UK. That is a question of law, rather than a re-run of the facts agreed at trial. ## Why the training location matters Getty's original claim of primary copyright infringement fell away during the High Court trial. Under the 1988 Act, primary infringement must involve acts that took place in the UK, and Getty could not show that the training of Stable Diffusion happened here. Stability AI maintained that none of its training took place in the UK, and Getty withdrew those claims to focus on the secondary infringement arguments instead. That leaves an important question unanswered. There is still no UK court ruling confirming whether training an AI model in the UK using copyrighted works without permission would amount to primary infringement. Whatever the Court of Appeal decides in this case, that wider question is likely to remain open. ## Pressure for reform of copyright law The case has also added to pressure on the government to update copyright law for the age of generative AI. A report published in October by the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford called for reforms to the primary and secondary infringement provisions, a legally binding licensing regime for rights holders, and transparency duties on AI providers. The government has previously said it does not favour an express licensing requirement, arguing it could make the UK less competitive than other countries in encouraging AI development. In March it confirmed it would not pursue other reform options it had consulted on, and would instead gather more evidence and monitor developments elsewhere before deciding on next steps. Parliamentarians are continuing to press for action. Conservative MP Damian Hinds has brought a private member's bill aimed at giving online publishers greater visibility over the scraping of their content by online bots, with a second reading due in the House of Commons on 27 November. No judgment was expected on the day of the hearing. The Court of Appeal's decision, when it comes, will be watched by photographers, publishers, AI developers and lawyers across the UK and beyond, because it will shape how far existing copyright law reaches into AI systems trained outside the country. Sources: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/analysis/getty-appeal-wont-address-all-uk-ai-copyright-questions and https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2548997/getty-renews-attack-on-stability-ai-as-copyright-claim-reaches-uk-appeal-court