Anyone looking for a beautiful photograph of a desert landscape can find many choices from Getty Images, the stock photography collection.
The difference, said Getty Images CEO Craig Peters, is this new service is “commercially viable” for business clients and “wasn't trained on the open internet with stolen imagery.” In a lawsuit filed early this year in a Delaware federal court, Getty alleged that London-based Stability AI had copied without permission more than 12 million photographs from its collection, along with captions and metadata, “as part of its efforts to build a competing business.”
Getty contributors will also be paid for having their images included in the training set, incorporated as part of royalty obligations so that the company is “actually sharing the revenue with them over time rather than paying a one-time fee or not paying that at all,” Peters said.