A US judge dismissed AI copyright infringement claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt by three artists, but allowed a claim against Stability AI to proceed
While a federal judge advanced an infringement claim against Stability AI, he dismissed the rest of the lawsuit.
Its significance is clearer in the case’s later arc: a subsequent ruling let artists pursue some claims against the AI companies, showing that early dismissals did not end the underlying copyright fight.
First-order effects
Stability AI remains exposed to an active infringement claim, while Midjourney and DeviantArt avoid the claims dismissed in this ruling.
The artists’ litigation shifts from a uniform challenge to defendant-specific allegations, raising the importance of how each company’s products and conduct are pleaded.
Second-order effects
Image-generation providers face pressure to differentiate their legal defenses and product practices rather than relying on a single industry-wide answer to artist claims.
Platforms commercializing AI-generated images must account for litigation risk that can vary by provider and by the particular claim, not merely by whether a tool generates art.
Third-order effects
If courts continue to parse AI copyright cases company by company, the market may develop uneven legal exposure that favors firms able to sustain lengthy, fact-intensive litigation.
The dispute is part of a longer effort to define how copyright law applies to AI systems, alongside the separate rule that AI-made work lacks the human authorship needed for copyright protection.
The trend: Generative-AI copyright disputes are moving from broad challenges to more granular tests of individual companies’ data, products and alleged conduct.
(Stability AI) Similarly fails — Judge demands facts re: Plaintiff's “compressed works” theory. Even then, Judge remains dubious: “Plaintiff's complaint is devoid of any allegations that [the artist's works] were used to create “fakes” of their work.” Dismissed / leave to amend […
The judge appears dubious of the notion that Stable Diffusion contains “compressed copies” of all of the training images, and unless plaintiffs can plausibly allege as much, there won't be a viable theory of direct infringement against users of the tool. 4/
Breaking: Judge Orrick dismissed most of the claims brought by the artists in Andersen v. Stability AI. This was an unsurprising result. Just because the technology is “new” doesn't mean we disregard current law. The claims were doomed regardless of AI.🧵https://acrobat.adobe.com/…
Reading the tea leaves, it's likely that plaintiffs' direct infringement claims are going to be limited to the copying of images to train Stable Diffusion in the first instance. 3/
Importantly, the court also appears to be quite skeptical of plaintiffs' theory that *all* output images are necessarily “derivative works” of all of the training images, and is likely to require allegations that 5/