Artists' claims against image-model makers survive to discovery

The process wall

Three illustrators, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, filed a proposed class action on 13 January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt over Stable Diffusion, alleging, among other claims, that the model was trained on billions of scraped images including their own and that its outputs are derivative works. The wall the case tests is not whether the process happened but whether the complaint's description of it survives a motion to dismiss: an artist can allege that a model was trained on her work, but a court will only let a claim proceed once the allegation clears the pleading bar and identifies which registered works and which defendant's conduct are at issue.

What the documents show

Judge William Orrick's 30 October 2023 order dismissed nearly everything with leave to amend, keeping alive only Andersen's direct-infringement claim against Stability, and required the plaintiffs to define what they meant by Stable Diffusion holding compressed copies of training images. The amended complaint added Runway AI as a defendant and seven more plaintiffs; Orrick's 12 August 2024 order found the new allegations plausible enough to let copyright claims proceed against all four companies, while dismissing the DMCA claims against every defendant with prejudice because the complaint never alleged an identical output, and dismissing DeviantArt's contract claim with prejudice.

Authorship and limitation

Neither order decides whether training or generation actually infringes; both apply only the plausibility standard, accepting the plaintiffs' allegations as true at this stage. The mechanism at issue is not authorship but reproduction: whether a trained model retains, in some mathematical form, enough of a copyrighted image that using the model reproduces protected expression, a question the August 2024 order explicitly leaves for summary judgment after discovery. The DMCA dismissal turned on a narrower technical point, that removing credit information from a work requires the resulting copy to be identical to it, which the plaintiffs had not alleged.

What survives

What survives, as of retrieval, is a live case at the pleading stage: direct copyright claims proceeding against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway, plus Midjourney-specific Lanham Act claims over its published artist-name list. Editorially, a maker should treat every allegation in this docket as exactly that, an allegation the court has found plausible enough to test, not a finding that any named company infringed.

• Read the October 2023 and August 2024 orders' own account of which theories survived and which were dismissed with prejudice.
• Check the docket for the current stage, since the case remains pre-trial as of this writing.
• Compare the DMCA identical-copy reasoning against a different court's approach to the same statute.

Two orders into this litigation, the record shows a court narrowing plaintiffs' theories rather than resolving whether AI training or output infringes; that resolution, if it comes, will arrive later and elsewhere in the docket.