Getty vs. The Machine — Watermarks That Became Training Data

The Image I Generated by Accident

I am going to tell you about a watermark, because a watermark is the only honest part of this chapter.

I was in an office that had a glass wall and a plant that was a contractor. Someone said we should "see what the image model does with editorial." Someone else, who should have known better and was me, typed a prompt that was a news event plus the word photorealistic. The image came back with a sky and a crowd and, in the corner, a ghost of a Getty watermark — not a clean overlay, a texture the model had learned the way a child learns a face. We laughed. We should not have laughed. We cropped it. We did not put it in the deck. We put it in a Slack that was later produced, or would have been, if anyone had asked.

A watermark is a signature that says this picture has a parent. The model treated the signature as weather. Weather is what you train on.

Case File: Getty Images v. Stability AI

Getty sued Stability AI in London and in the United States. The London case is the one that went to trial. On November 4, 2025, Justice Joanna Smith handed down a judgment that the industry read as a weather report and the artists read as a funeral with a canapé. In December she gave Getty permission to appeal the copyright loss. The funeral, if it is one, is still seating people.

Getty abandoned its primary copyright claim at trial. That sentence is doing a lot of work. You do not abandon a claim because you are shy. You abandon it because the evidence, or the law, or the appetite for a fight, has moved. What remained of the copyright case failed. The court accepted, in substance, that the trained model does not store and reproduce Getty's works the way a hard drive stores a JPEG. The output is a generation. The generation is not a copy in the sense the statute grew up with.

The trademark claim survived in a form so thin you could see through it. Some outputs of Stable Diffusion versions 1 and 2, generated through DreamStudio, could display Getty-like watermarks. That was passing off, or close enough to passing off that Getty got a limited win. Not a market. Not a training ban. A watermark.

I have sat with that result the way I sat with Alsup: two columns. Training. Watermark. Under the first, not proved as infringement in London. Under the second, a ghost the model learned. The pad still looks like homework. The homework is the industry.

The Photographer Who Still Owns a Camera

I had lunch with a photographer who has a Getty contract and a knee that remembers a riot. He paid. He does not like salad. He said the agency used to be a pain and was now a ghost. He said the day rates had not moved in a way that matched the rent. He said he had typed his own name into an image model and gotten back a street that was his street and a light that was his light and a caption that was a stranger's. He did not sue. He does not have a Lyle for that kind of suit. He has a knee.

I asked him if he still watermarks. He said yes, out of habit, the way a person still locks a door in a building that has already been copied. I said the model likes the watermark. He said he had heard. He ate the thing that was not salad. I paid for the coffee because the lunch had already been a kindness.

Walking out I passed a bus shelter ad that was a photograph of a lake. The lake had a stock-photo sky. The sky had no watermark. I thought about the contractor plant. I thought about the Slack. I did not text the photographer. There is nothing useful to say to a person whose light is now a parameter.

What a Stock Agency Is For, If You Have Only Used Unsplash

Getty is a library that charges. The charge is how a photographer eats. The library is how an art director finds a lake at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. For twenty years the internet tried to make the library free. Unsplash made it free and called it community. Pinterest made it free and called it inspiration. The models made it free and called it weights.

I am not a Getty partisan. Getty has sent invoices that made small magazines consider a drawing. Getty has also paid people who stood in crowds so that a newspaper could have a picture of the crowd. When the model generates the crowd, the invoice has nowhere to go. The limited trademark win is an invoice for a ghost. The ghost does not cover the knee.

Lyle said I should not call the London judgment a funeral. He said it was a narrowing. A narrowing is what happens when a big case becomes a small holding. I am calling it a canapé because that is what a funeral looks like when the caterer is still billing by the hour and the body has already been trained into a checkpoint named sd-v1-5.

DreamStudio and the Versions That Learned the Signature

Stable Diffusion version 1 and version 2 were the teenagers. They had been fed a diet that included, among other things, pictures that still wore their agency clothes. DreamStudio was the storefront. A user typed a prompt. The storefront returned an image. Sometimes the image returned the clothes. Justice Smith could see the clothes. The clothes were the win.

Later versions, and other people's versions, learned to leave the clothes off. That is called progress if you are a release note. That is called hiding the body if you are a photographer with a knee. I am not going to tell you which checkpoint to avoid. Lyle would shred the paragraph. I am going to tell you that a watermark is only a problem for a company if the watermark is visible. Invisible training is the product.

Pilar asked me, on a Tuesday that had too much orange oil, why a picture needed a name in the corner. I said so the person who took it could get paid again. She said, "Like a book." I said like a book, except the book at least had a page you could hold. She held up the rag. She said the rag used to be a dishcloth and still knew it. I did not have a better metaphor. I still do not.

LAION, the Five Billion, and the Spreadsheet of the Visual World

If Books3 is a buffet of novels, LAION-5B is a buffet of pictures — billions of image-URL pairs scraped from the web, filtered by a model that guessed whether the picture matched the text, released so that anyone could train a diffusion model in a garage that was not the painter's. Stability's models grew up on that diet, or a cousin of that diet. Getty's pictures, if they were on the web with alt text, could become a row. A row is not a JPEG on a hard drive in London. A row is a pointer. Justice Smith cared about what the model stored. The pointer is a different animal. The animal is still Getty's light.

I have downloaded a slice of a LAION-style list. I am not proud of the afternoon. I searched for a photographer I knew. I found him. I found a wedding. I found a riot. I found a picture of his kid that should not have been a row. I closed the file. I did not send him the rows. There is no kind way to say your child is a pair. I told Lyle. Lyle said I should not have opened the file. He was right. I opened it because I am the kind of person this book is about: someone who needs to see the buffet to believe the buffet.

The American Case, the One That Did Not Get the Headlines

Getty also sued in the United States. The U.S. case has not been the celebrity. London went to trial. London produced a judgment a person can hold. The American docket has the slower weather — motions, definitions of a market, a fight about whether a watermark is a trademark when a model dreams it. I am not going to pretend I have the latest minute order in my pocket. I am going to say that two countries can look at the same buffet and see a copy in one and a generation in the other. That is not hypocrisy. That is borders. Borders are why companies shop for forums the way they used to shop for tax.

The Art Director Who Stopped Calling

I know an art director — magazines, then brands, then a title that has "content" in it — who used to call the photographer with the knee. She stopped. She told me she stopped because the budget stopped. She told me later she stopped because the model was faster and the client could not tell. She is not a villain. She is a slider. The slider moved. She can still tell the difference. She is paid not to say so in the meeting.

We had a drink in a bar that had photographs on the wall that were actually photographs. She said she missed waiting. I said waiting was how you knew a person was coming. She said she did not have a deck for waiting. I said I did not either. We looked at the wall. The wall had a credit. The credit had a name. The name was not a probability. I paid. She left a tip that was a person. That is the only licensing deal in this chapter I respect.

Why I Keep the Slack, Even Though I Should Not

I said we put the watermark image in a Slack that was later produced, or would have been. I still have a copy of that image in a folder I do not open. Lyle told me to delete it. I have not. I am not keeping it as a trophy. I am keeping it as a reminder that we laughed. The laugh is the part of this book I cannot depreciate. If I delete the image I will start telling myself we were careful. We were not careful. We cropped a ghost and we went to lunch. The ghost is Getty. The lunch is gone. The folder stays.

Pilar asked, another Tuesday, whether I was still "doing the pictures." I said no. She said good. She said the paperback was enough trouble. I said the paperback and the picture were the same trouble in different clothes. She said the paperback at least stayed on the counter. I said that was true. The counter is a jurisdiction the model has not yet learned to dust.

The Stock Kitchen That Never Existed

There is a photograph of a kitchen that has been used to sell a thousand things. White marble. A lemon that is not Pilar's lemon. A window that looks onto a field no house in that price range possesses. I have generated that kitchen. You have seen that kitchen. The kitchen is a consensus. Consensus kitchens are how you know a model has been fed stock. Stock is a consensus that used to pay a day rate.

I showed the generated kitchen to the photographer with the knee. He said the window was a Getty window. I said I could not prove it. He said he could feel it. Feeling is not a caption. Feeling is why he still has a camera. I deleted the kitchen. Deleting an output does not delete a consensus. The consensus is the product. The product is a world in which no particular kitchen needs to have been cleaned.

How a Watermark Becomes Weather, Without a Diagram

I am not going to give you a lesson in diffusion. I am going to give you the kitchen version. The model is shown many pictures. Some of the pictures have a faint word in the corner. The word is correlated with a certain kind of picture — editorial, news, a crowd, a face that was worth an invoice. The model learns that the word and the crowd arrive together, the way a child learns that thunder and rain arrive together. When you ask for a crowd, sometimes you get thunder. The thunder is Getty.

Later versions learn to make rain without the sound. That is the release note. The correlation is still in the weights; it has just learned not to spell. Justice Smith could punish the spelling. She could not, on the copyright theory that remained, punish the weather. That is why the win was a watermark and not a market. That is why the photographer's knee is still a knee.

Contributor Agreements and the Box That Was Always There

Stock contributors signed agreements that were already lopsided when the lopsidedness was about magazines. The agreements had a hereafter-devised suitcase. Agencies sent emails about AI opt-out with defaults that favored the factory. I have read three of those emails. I will not reconstruct them. Their physics was Cloudflare's dashboard with worse type.

A contributor who lives on day rates does not have a Lyle for a contributor agreement. She has a portal and a password she resets twice a year. The portal is where the meal is marked as eaten. I told the photographer with the knee to read the portal. He said he had. He said the language was a fog. I said fog is a default. He said he still needed the other kind of license. I have already told you he left the default. I am telling you again because Chapter 5 is where photographers arrive, late, and I need the box to be visible.

The American Docket, Without Pretending I Have This Morning's Order

Getty's U.S. case has not given us a trial day we can put on a mug. It has given us the slower weather: what is a market, what is a trademark when a machine dreams a logo, whether a Delaware caption is a different animal than a London judgment. I will not invent a holding. I will say that companies shop for forums and that two forums have already disagreed about the temperature of the same buffet. If you are waiting for America to save the knee, you are waiting for a later room. London handed you a canapé. Eat it or do not. It will not feed you.

C2PA, Content Credentials, and the Badge That Wants to Be a Law

The industry, having eaten the photographs, would now like to label the photographs. C2PA. Content credentials. A watermark you are supposed to trust because a committee invented it. I have sat in a meeting where a person said credentials would "restore trust in media." I said trust was not restored by a badge on a meal you did not pay for. He said the badge was for the output, not the training. I said then the badge was a courtesy to the user and a shrug to the knee. He said I was being ideological. I said I was being a person who had cropped a ghost.

I am not against credentials. A provenance trail is useful if you are a newsroom that still has an editor. A provenance trail is a costume if you are a company that trained on the unlabeled world and would now like the labeled world to start tomorrow. Tomorrow is not a remedy for yesterday's buffet. Wear the badge if you want. Do not confuse it with a check.

Unsplash, the Community, and the Feeling of Having Donated a Lake

Unsplash told photographers they were a community. The community was a free lake for art directors who had run out of budget. The lake was crawled. The crawl became a row. The row became a consensus kitchen. I have used Unsplash. I have used it in a slide. I am not going to pretend I was clean. The clean position would have been to pay the person with the knee. I paid Unsplash in the currency of a click. The click was the grant. The grant was 2014 physics again.

Some community sites later tried to add terms that forbade training. The terms arrived after the lake had been drunk. Terms that arrive after the lake are Chapter 8 in a different costume. I put them here because the costume is visual. A photographer who uploaded a lake to be kind is the most expensive kind of donor. Kindness is mineral. The factory does not send a thank-you note that is not a feature.

The Wedding That Became a Row

I am going to repeat the child in the LAION slice only long enough to put the wedding next to it. A wedding is a private day that becomes public because a photographer has a portfolio and a couple has a website and a crawl does not know what a vow is. The row does not say vow. The row says a URL and a caption and a probability that the picture is a bride. I have stood in a wedding as a guest and watched a person I love become, later, a pair. I did not tell them. There is no kind way. This is the only way I have: a paragraph that does not include their names and a file I closed. If you build datasets, close the file that has the child. If you cannot close it, you are not in a seminar. You are in a room I left.