Across the Atlantic, related proceedings continue to gather pace. In Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd., 700 F. Supp. 3d 853 (N.D. Cal. 2023), a group of visual artists including Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz filed a class action in January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
The artists alleged that their works were scraped into the LAION-5B dataset of five billion images and used to train image generators without consent or payment.
In August 2024, US District Judge William Orrick refused to dismiss the core copyright claims, finding that the artists had plausibly argued that Stable Diffusion was built, to a significant extent, on copyrighted works. The case is now proceeding toward trial, set for September 2026. Meanwhile, Getty’s parallel US claim — filed in February 2023 and later transferred to the Northern District of California — remains active, with Getty stating it intends to use factual findings from the UK ruling to support its ongoing American litigation.
Artists have pursued similar claims against Google in: Zhang v. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc., No. 3:24-CV-02531 (N.D. Cal. 2024), targeting the company’s Imagen image generator. These cases collectively signal that US courts are taking AI copyright disputes seriously, even if no definitive ruling on fair use and AI training has yet emerged.
The European Position: Regulation Ahead of Litigation
The EU has taken a more legislative approach. The Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive 2019/790 established text and data mining (TDM) exceptions to copyright, permitting reproduction for research and certain commercial purposes, unless rights holders have expressly opted out. The EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, which entered into force in August 2024, goes further, requiring providers of general-purpose AI models to publish summaries of training data, comply with copyright rules and honour opt-outs expressed by rights holders.
Domestic courts within the EU have also seen some litigation. At the Hamburg Regional Court (*Landgericht Hamburg*, 27 September 2024, AS. 310 O 227/23), a stock photographer brought proceedings against LAION, the non-profit behind the LAION-5B dataset, alleging unlawful copying of their images. The case rests on whether the TDM exception under Article 4 of the DSM Directive provides a valid defence.
More notably, a Munich court in November 2025 issued an injunction against OpenAI over the reproduction of copyrighted German song lyrics, finding that ChatGPT had memorised and reproduced protected text, a ruling that directly contradicts the pattern-learning argument Stability AI successfully deployed in the UK.