Some of the biggest AI news this week comes from a federal judge in Northern California, who denied critical parts of Stability AI, Midjourney, Inc., DeviantArt, Inc., and Runway AI’s bid to get a copyright-centric lawsuit waged against them by a group of artists dismissed. In an August 12 order, Judge William Orrick of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed Plaintiffs Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernen, and Karla Ortiz’s claims of unjust enrichment, breach of contract, and violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. But more important that the causes of action that the court dismissed (after previously dismissing some of the plaintiffs’ claims in October 2023), are the ones it kept in place, namely, the plaintiffs’ copyright infringement claims.
A bit of background: To date, the plaintiffs have set out a number of copyright infringement claims against the defendants – which are developers of platforms that use generative AI to transform users’ text prompts into images – based on at least two direct infringement theories, as well as induced copyright infringement grounds.
In refusing to decide the bulk of the plaintiffs’ case (i.e., their copyright infringement claims), the court found that Andersen, McKernen, and Ortiz sufficiently alleged that their works were included in the vast datasets used by the defendants to train the models that power Stable Diffusion and similar generative AI platforms.
