Judge Says Stability AI and Midjourney Should Face Copyright Case

A California federal judge said he was inclined to green-light a copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies accused of misusing visual artists’ work to train their artificial intelligence-based image generation systems.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said on Tuesday, opens new tab that the ten artists behind the lawsuit had plausibly argued that Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission.

Illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz initially sued the companies last January in one of the first of several high-stakes lawsuits against tech companies over the use of copyrighted work in AI training. Orrick dismissed many of their allegations in October but allowed them to be refiled.

Read more at Reuters