Stable Diffusion’s Shallow Victory Over Getty Images in the UK - DTNS 5139

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 4th, 2025. 5 we tell you what you need to know follow up on the context of those stories and help each other understand today stable diffusion comes out ahead of getty images in the uk but does it set any precedent that's a good question tom i'm happy you asked i'm jason howell i'm tom merit let's start with what you need to know with the big story yes getty images has officially lost its UK lawsuit against Stability AI, mostly, I'd say. It's mostly dead. It's mostly dead. It's mostly a loss is more what I mean. The lawsuit centered on claims of primary copyright infringement, secondary copyright infringement, trademark infringement, lots of infringement going on around here.

0:57Giddy dropped the main copyright argument during the trial. um it basically it was unable to prove that stable diffusion was trained on getty images in the uk it also could not prove that stable diffusion was able to reproduce exact images from its catalog and judge joanna smith found getty's trademark infringed on some ai outputs that included getty's watermark so the watermark could sometimes be made to appear but called the impact, quote, historic and extremely limited, which we can get into. The judge basically dismissed secondary copyright claims, like I said, ruling that because Stable Diffusion's model doesn't actually store or reproduce full works from Giddy Images' catalog, it doesn't create infringing copies.

1:49And this is something that we keep kind of hearing is, you know, is it actually storing or creating a copy or is it influenced by this information to create something else? And that's kind of what we're looking at here. Getty is also, by the way, pursuing legal action against stability AI in the US. This clearly has nothing to do with the US case, but I don't know. What do you think, Tom? Does this signal any sort of anything for what we might expect here in the U.S. with the other case. No. No. It doesn't. This is an almost useless case. And not because the judge did anything wrong, but there's the jurisdiction argument that you mentioned.

2:31Well, if it was trained, you can't show evidence it was trained in the U.K., so the U.K. can't say it was illegal to train it in the U.S. because the U.K. doesn't have jurisdiction in the U.S. So that's what you might call a technicality, but the judge is proper in saying that. Like, well, if you can't show that the training was done here, then you can't bring the case here. You got to bring the case somewhere else. The trademark stuff, when she says it's historic, like colloquially, it sounds like, oh, that means it's really important. She's like, no, no, no. This means they were doing it in the past.

3:02So it doesn't have any impact on the future as long as they don't do it. It doesn't set any precedence. It's like, yeah, they put out an image with a Getty watermark. Anybody who does that is going to be infringing. So it's very limited in that case. And so what Getty won is very narrow would be the way that I put it. The secondary infringement is where it gets interesting because the judge did say, look, this model does not store or reproduce, so it doesn't infringe. and that is going to be something that companies are going to want to put in front of other courts and that's where they could go to a u.s judge and say you know just to bolster their case hey this judge in the uk said this it doesn't bind a u.s judge but it could influence them to say another judge you know has said this that's reasonable right uh and the fact is it does not uh the ai models the llms the the multimodal models do not store copies there's no confusion about that and I'm glad this judge pointed that out.

4:03What these models do is they take works and they create a database of relationships based on them. And that database is full of relationships of lots of other works as well. And so the secondary infringement, I think, is going to continue to get struck down in most of these cases. It's the primary infringement that she couldn't rule on because it didn't happen in the UK. That's where it gets really interesting and where judges could say, Well, you did copy their works for the training purposes, even though you didn't keep them. And maybe or maybe not that was infringing. But because this case didn't rule on it, it really doesn't set any precedence.

4:41Yeah, I think what's interesting to me is a few things. One, these cases aren't, at least at this point, not seeming to be completely open and shut. There is, you know what I mean? I think there are a lot of people who look at what companies like Stability AI are doing as far as they're training their models and what they hope is, dang it, it's going to go in there and it's going to be a clear-cut case that this is absolutely not okay for them to be doing. And while this isn't setting precedent, it's not an open and shut case, which shows that there's still a lot to be figured out. And I wonder, in aggregate, when you take the ruling of this and you've got the books case that we got a ruling.

5:23Very recently, there was the Universal Music Group versus UDO, and that kind of got settled. Obviously, they announced a deal there, so that's a little bit different. But all these things in aggregate, do they – I don't know. Do they point toward a guess that we can make as far as like once a final determination around fair use and how this data is being used is made? What are the tea leaves saying at this point? I don't know. I'm curious to know your thoughts on that. I mean what you're describing to me just sounds like the way the law works. You rarely have open and shut cases, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't need an adversarial process.

6:04If everything was open and shut, you could just have a judge look at it and go, yep, they're guilty. And the reason you have trials is because there are nuances. And you need a judge to come out and say, okay, let me judge these nuances and decide where it goes. And we need one of two things. Either we need a new law in whatever, whether we're talking about the UK or somewhere else, We need a law that says very clearly, here's what's legal and here's what isn't, and then you'll get fewer of these cases. The reason you have these cases is our laws don't contemplate this situation. They don't contemplate a large language model and a relational database and all the nuances and complexities that go along with it, which is why you keep seeing all these nuanced and complex cases coming forward.

6:51short of a new law, what we need is the highest court in the UK, the Supreme Court there or the Supreme Court in the United States or anywhere else to weigh in and say, this is what we think. That won't stop all lawsuits, but it will give you the guidelines that let companies avoid them if they want to, right? And companies that like to skate the line might still get brought to court in that case, but it would reduce the number because at least you'd have a precedent to go on. But until we get – we'll probably get the high court's ruling before we get a new law. And until we get one of those, you're going to continue to see a lot of these cases trying things out because trademark and copyright laws have always contemplated that humans are behind everything.

7:40And they've contemplated a world where it's very clear what is a copy and what isn't. And LLMs have muddied both of those waters. They really have. They have definitely muddied those waters. It's no longer very clear to see that. Obviously, stability is going to cheer this and feel validated in that regard. And there might be other AI companies looking at this and going, okay, for whatever reason, be it false comfort or whatever, feeling validated on their end too. Well, Getty is cheering this, right? Because that's good PR to say like, they ruled that you can't output our watermark, right? Yeah, that's true.

8:17Everybody's going to try to spin it the best way possible. That's a piece of it anyways that they can celebrate. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, nonetheless. I'm super curious to, I don't know, snap forward five years from now or however long it's going to take to see where this all settles because we're just seeing these cases happening. It's just fascinating to me to watch it play out. Like you said, I think the point of, you know, we've had a good understanding or pretty reasonable understanding of what this all means. And then along comes this new technology that really forces a foundational shift in how we look at these things.

8:48And so it's a pretty interesting time for for ownership right now and to understand what what is ownership in the current age. Yeah. And for the listeners of our show, what we hope you get out of us discussing this is an understanding that no single headline you see is going to be like, well, that's the case at this point. And when you see Getty and Stable Diffusion both claiming victory, that's why. At least you'll understand that much. and that is made possible thanks to you guys who support the show big thanks to folks like mike akins norm fazikas chris allen and welcome to our brand new patrons who support us on patreon.com slash dtns sammy d and ricky s welcome good to have you

9:39all right we have a lot more to talk about so let's get to the briefs No, it is not Sunday, but we still have Bloomberg's Mark Gurman with an Apple leak for us. Usually he puts that out in his Power On newsletter, but it's like an off-cycle patch from Microsoft, except a Gurman rumor. Gurman's extremely reliable sources tell him that Apple is working on a budget Mac, codenamed J700, that runs on an A-series processor. In other words, the ones used in iPhones and sometimes iPads. Apparently, it's targeted at the Chromebook crowd. So people who browse the web do some light document work, media editing, light media editing.

10:20The sources say the idea is to launch it in the first half of the year for less than$1 ,000. Oh, okay. Wow. Right now, the cheapest MacBook you can get is$9.99. So it would probably be less than that. Oh, okay. Okay, and that was kind of one of my questions was, I know, targeting the Chromebook crowd, does that mean that it's a laptop versus a desktop? Because you can get an Apple desktop for less than$1 ,000, right? If you're doing the Mac Mini, is that less than$1 ,000 at this point? It's been so long since I've even considered this. No, we're talking about a laptop here. But yeah, let me look that up.

10:55I don't know if you can still get a Mac. Yeah, yeah, you can get a Mac Mini for$500. You're right. But that doesn't come with a keyboard or a screen. Right, no, no, no, totally. No, we're talking about a laptop here. Man, if you're talking about an Apple laptop under$1 ,000, yeah, that's super appealing for that kind of use case. I know for a fact, at least from a student perspective, my kids through the school, they were offered and supplied Chromebooks, right? This is just like the laptop that everybody gets. And it did not take my older daughter very long to be like, so do you have a laptop, like a Mac laptop that I can use?

11:28because, you know, kind of like an iPhone, there's a little bit of a status thing attached to it, not to mention capability and all that kind of stuff. But I think that would be a big deal. Really big deal. It's interesting to see what Apple has considered its entry in this race, the iPad, which you can get for less than$1 ,000, even with a keyboard cover. Start to use the M series processor, the one that you use in Macs, and then them do a low-end Mac that uses the A series processor. And we have a Mac with a touchscreen now, so presumably this one could have a touchscreen, although if they're keeping the price down, maybe it won't, in which case that's another differentiator.

12:07Chrome OS Chromebooks often do have a touchscreen in them. But not always. But quite often. So it's an interesting move for Apple and probably a wise one because they used to be dominant in the education space, and the Chromebook really did drive them out in a lot of areas. Yeah, interesting. Well, there is more Apple news to talk about. Apple introduced a front end for its web-based app store. Now users can use that page itself and not like launch open the app store app, essentially, to browse the store's full directory. No need to launch that standalone app anymore. It's going to make a lot of people very happy.

12:48The site has pages for all of Apple's major devices, all of their app categories. The site also includes an updated Today tab. So if you're an iPhone user, you're going to recognize that. There's also kind of some tweaks to search. So you don't have to open up a Google search tab and search the results there in order to get to the App Store's product page like a lot of people have done before. In other Apple-related news, they also released version 26.1 of its entire family of OS. So iOS and iPadOS 26.1 get the new tinted liquid glass option. That's meant to improve readability. macOS Tahoe also gets that feature.

13:29You now can deactivate swipe left on the lock screen to open up the camera on iOS. iPad OS brings back slide over with resizable windows, new window management options. That's just to name a few. So 26.1 coming, probably lots of really great features to check out no matter what price you have. Yeah, if you are someone who doesn't like liquid glass but doesn't want to turn it off all the way, and there are a few people out there like that, they're calling it tinted. I might call it frosted is another way to think of it if you're trying to imagine it. I think that's a good option to give people because otherwise you had to go into accessibility and just turn it off.

14:07And then that did a lot of things that were good for accessibility, but maybe not what you were looking for. Going back to this, I am puzzled by this web-based app store. Apple's belief in the past was if you're on an Apple device, you'll use the app store, whether it's the Mac app store or the iOS app store. and if you were searching on Google for an app, you didn't need a front end. You just take you to the product page and Apple has had those for a long time. And so presenting this as like, instead of having to go to Google, it's like, but then why would you ever go to the App Store front page on the web?

14:47My guess is it might be some kind of promotional need on Apple's part to want to promote the web, promote the App Store in a way that would be accessible no matter what device you're on, so you can see what's available. Maybe that's part of it. But as far as being directed towards a user of an Apple product, I don't know why you would prefer to use this, since once you get to the app you're looking for, it's just going to knock you to the App Store anyway. Yeah, that is an interesting question. And it's a long road down the line to finally get to the point to where apple's like okay i think we need a web page or website yeah yeah there's some other motivation because it because user wise i don't think anyone was out there complaining like you know what i get upset with is i don't get a front page to the app store like you could search for apple apps and you get the product page and and then you could go from there right it's yeah not not as big of a deal uh whatsapp launched its apple watch app after being uh outed last week by WAA Beta Info.

15:50The new app lets you read messages and reply, of course, but read full messages now, so you don't get cut off. You can also get call notifications. You can record your voice and send voice recordings directly from the watch. The app also includes reactions, so you can do emoji reactions. You get more of your chat history now and a clearer, more tailored display of images and stickers. They just improve the readability, basically. New app requires Apple Watch Series 4 or newer, and you have to run watchOS 10, and then you can take advantage of it. Big WhatsApp user. Are you looking forward to this on your Apple Watch?

16:26I do, actually. While we were recording, our dog walker messaged on WhatsApp that he'll be here in 20 minutes. So, you know, like I use WhatsApp for a few things. It's that modern curse we live in where you have to know, like, which person am I talking to? What platform do they use? Oh, man, tell me about it. But yeah, I do use WhatsApp for some of those. And the dog walker stuff on the watch is important. So having a few more features and reactions. I don't know if I'm going to do that many emoji reactions with it, honestly. I don't know. You and your dog walker, you might have an emoji style relationship.

17:00Yeah. You know what? Now that you say it, I'm looking at the chat history. There's a few emojis in there. So it's not impossible. There you go. There you go. Coca-Cola released its holiday ads. And like last year, they're leaning into the use of generative AI with some modifications on one of them. Last year's ad was heavily criticized, if you remember, by a lot of professional creatives, just in general for the use of generative AI. Also, some oddities that were pretty easy to spot in the output. There was like this uncanny valley aspect to the human models that were in the video. There were wheels that weren't actually turning, so it kind of looked like the vehicles were gliding and stuff.

17:44Weird little AI oddities that we've had another year of time to really get more expert at spotting. This time around with the ad campaign that's called Holidays Are Coming, Coca-Cola has put animals primarily in place of humans. That helps on the whole Ant-Penny Valley thing. It also kept human faces off screen, except for Santa. Do you really see his face? I mean, yeah. There's a billboard where you see his face. Oh, okay, okay. But the animation of him, it's just his hands. So there's no at least uncanny movement there. Commercials are created with studios, AI studios, Silverside AI and Secret Level.

18:24And the company says it took around a month to produce. That's opposed to a year for ads that were done with more traditional techniques and talent. Coca-Cola says it still involves around 100 people. Only five AI specialists produced more than 70 ,000 clips. And then you have all of those people as kind of support around making that ad, I don't know, broadcastable, broadcast worthy. Yeah. Let's set aside the is it taking people's jobs? Is there proper copyright provenance? If you can, set those aside for a moment. uh this isn't as good as previous uh ways of doing it it's better than it was last year uh i did a live reaction to it i hadn't watched it so on our office hour stream that i do on youtube on mondays and tuesdays uh on monday's office hour stream i did a live reaction and the thing i noticed was the quality of the animals varied some of them were more cartoony than others it was not consistent Yeah.

19:29Do you notice that too? It's like, man, the gophers look really good, but the raccoon looks like it was drawn by Hanna-Barbera. Not quite that wide, but there was a difference there. So I think it was fine. And what I came to in the end was like, yeah, this isn't perfect, but they're getting better. More people are learning how to use these tools. They'll probably figure out that consistency in the future. and this ad will do what it's meant to do, which is someone passively watching television and not paying close attention will think, I feel better about Coca-Cola and the holidays because cheerful animals, right?

20:10Like, I don't think that many people are going to sit there staring closely and like me and say, those animals don't look consistently generated. No, and Coca-Cola is a big enough company with deep enough pockets to make sure that the kinds of tells and the kind of clues that would get your everyday watcher on TV to go, wait a minute, what did I just see there? That would never enter the equation at this point, especially. Their systems and their money is large enough to largely prevent that. Most people, yeah, they aren't watching actively like that. They're just like, oh, that's a cool brand.

20:50holiday things, seeing some totally holiday looking stuff. They're not immediately getting that emotional reaction. Yeah. Well, you know what people do get emotional about our awards and Tik TOK is going to contribute to the problem with its first ever U S based awards on December 18th at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California cat's eyes playing there like five days before there will be a live stream on tiktok and a recording of the event will be available for next day streaming on tubi uh the event will feature i would assume it'll be available on tiktok as well but it's interesting that it's on tubi uh the event will feature a red carpet of course uh for those arriving awards categories include creator of the year breakthrough artist video of the year muse of the year yeah i'm going apparently is one of one of the muses consideration i don't think I'm going to get considered then.

21:44Users of TikTok will be able to vote for their choices in a portal that will be offered on the platform starting November 18th. So you got a couple of weeks before that goes. And this isn't the first time TikTok has done awards. They just did them in Germany, Mexico, and Korea and other places before. This is the first time they've done them in the home of the award show, the United States of America. In the home of the country that can't decide whether it wants you or not. um instagram also announced not too many weeks ago that they have their own awards program that's like a well it's called ring and if you win you get a ring you get a gold ring well so i don't think amazon would do that for doorbell videos right yeah so apparently you know award shows for these platforms a thing it makes sense i suppose yeah yeah sorry if you are truly going up against paris i'm sorry to say tom you might no i'm not yeah i doubt i'll get nominated it would be an honor just to not be nominated and finally we have a few headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future yeah uh we keep hearing about samsung's trifold smartphone right they want to get into that trifold game along with huawei uh now one critical step closer to release as the device has been spotted in the bluetooth SIGS certification database under multiple versions.

23:09So it looks like they'll have multiple regional versions of this. Getting warmer. Amazon is rolling out Alexa Plus in the Amazon Music app for Alexa Plus early access beta users. That's you. You can look forward to enhanced song identification, vibe-driven playlists, and deeper conversational insights into your tracks, basically. Yeah, as long as it can recognize what musician I'm asking for, which it doesn't always, even the early beta. Microsoft Edge now lets Windows users store and sync passkeys in the Microsoft Password Manager. You can do it in the Microsoft Password Manager, but now you can do it in the Microsoft Password Manager in Edge as long as it's linked to your Microsoft account.

23:52Nice. Local governments in data center-heavy Chinese provinces like Gansu, Giju, and Inner Mongolia have increased subsidies that cut energy bills by up to half for some of the country's largest data centers, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent. Don't worry that those domestic chips are so expensive. We've cut your power cost. Yay. Waymo is going to launch its autonomous taxi service in three U.S. cities, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Detroit, starting next year. Vehicles starting to map those locations soon. So you may see the Waymo's rolling around doing mapping. Nintendo's selling a ton of Switch 2s, apparently.

24:34The company boosted its Switch 2 sales forecast for the current fiscal year, which ends on March 31st from 15 million units to 19 million units. That should make it better selling than the original Switch in its first year. Ah, Switch 2 was selling better than hotcakes, frankly. Hotcakes don't sell as well as they used to. No. Yeah. Not as well as they used to. Yeah. Yeah, if you call them flapjacks. There you go. There you go. Hotcakes 2 flapjacks. One month after Apple announced it would change Apple TV Plus to be called just Apple TV, We have a new sound to go along with the lack of the plus sign.

25:15So this is produced by Phineas, Billy Eilish's brother. It's a very short sound, but let's hear them back to back.

25:27Okay, that's the familiar one.

25:33I don't know what I think, honestly. i mean yeah as as a as a musician i listen to it and i go that first one is just somebody at a piano going duh yeah uh the second one you know there's a little bit of composition in there but it's still like two or three seconds like i don't know it's pleasant sounding it's fine i feel like these mostly just make you know oh i'm i'm watching that right like the right from netflix yeah uh and so this is gonna this is a little risky but maybe it's not that risky since not as many people watch apple tv plus but you're you're going to have to change that association in your head because they're not similar that's the thing it's not like oh it's the same thing but with a little different spin like it's it's kind of a different thing yeah well uh let us know what you think of apple's new sounds or anything else in our discord you can link your patreon account to enter our discord uh just go to patreon.com slash dtns we end every episode of dtns with some shared wisdom today cory and tj have some info and thoughts to add to the discussion yeah we uh we were talking about uh note-taking apps uh previously and i mentioned my uh untitled 11 uh text edit that i use.

26:52Corey said, your readers might appreciate a tip. There are minimal, uncomplicated note-taking apps out there. I use Standard Notes, a part of the Proton extended universe. It does just a few things, does them well, and stays out of your way. Strong end-to-end encryption, publicly available test and audit results with apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I find it clean, reliable, and underappreciated. The simple software revolution is already underway. StandardNotes.com if you want to check it out. Interesting. And then TJ added, am I the only one who, every time I hear a story about AI and how much more power is needed for it, immediately thinks of the matrix?

27:30Are we heading in that direction? Mostly kidding, but there is that little tiny lingering doubt. Regards. Yeah. Or are we already there, TJ? Are we there? Didn't I see a story recently that mathematically there was some discovery? We talked about that on Buzz Out Loud. 15 years ago. The Nick Bostrom thing. It keeps cropping up. I think I saw it again where it's like, yeah, it's not happening. Mathematically, this is not a simulation. Just give it up. But we'll be back there again. How would we know? How would we know? That's true. Maybe the math is just too advanced. Yeah. Thank you, TJ. And thank you, Corey, for the standard notes tip off.

28:09I love those kinds of emails where like, hey, I've got a cool tool maybe people don't know about and we can spread the word on it and folks may get some benefit about that. So keep those coming. What you're thinking about, what you like using, all of that stuff, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah. Thanks again, Corey and TJ for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

28:45The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.