In a significant ruling for AI copyright regulation, a US judge has rejected an appeal by several AI companies to dismiss a class-action copyright lawsuit.
As advanced AI-art generators emerged, visual artists and creators raised concerns that AI-generated art closely resembled their own work, leading to fears of data-scraping and copyright violations.
Artists, writers, and other creators claimed that AI companies had used their images to train AI models, noticing similarities in the AI-generated output. Users also observed that AI image generators could produce artwork in the style of specific artists, even though these artists had not given their consent.
This led several artists to file a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, alleging that these companies used copyrighted images to train their AI models without the artists’ consent or compensation.
In the initial lawsuit filed in February 2023, US Judge William Orrick upheld the copyright infringement claim against Stability AI but dismissed many other complaints, requesting further details from the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
The AI companies, however, sought to have the entire case dismissed, denying any copyright infringement and arguing that the plaintiffs had not made a valid claim under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
In his latest statements, Judge Orrick dismissed the companies’ arguments, considering new information provided by the artists’ lawyers.
The artists are now permitted to pursue their claims under the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act, the primary trademark statute in the US.
“We won BIG as the judge allowed ALL of our claims on copyright infringement to proceed and we historically move on The Lanham Act (trade dress) claims! We can now proceed onto discovery!” one of the plaintiffs, Karla Ortiz, wrote in a post on X.
As other AI copyright infringement cases emerge, this ruling could mark a pivotal moment as governments and courts navigate the challenges of the new AI era.
