Why are Getty and Shutterstock at odds in the AI ​​legal debate?

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For many people, whether they work for a company or write their own freelance blog, Getty Images and Shutterstock are similar companies, synonymous with the world of stock photos. Different prices, different offers, but still: both offer stock footage to add to digital or print content.

But over the past few months, it has become clear that the two companies have diverged in their efforts to deal with the exploding landscape of AI-powered text-to-image generation and evolving legal issues. fast. It is, it seems, a perfect example of what Michael Eshaghian, an attorney at Los Angeles-based Mesh IP Law, calls the "growing pains" of this new AI technology "until we we settled into a legal balance”.

For example, today The Verge announced that Getty Images intends to sue Stability AI, makers of the open-source text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, in the UK

Getty claims that Stability AI "illegally" scraped millions of images from its site (the full combination is not public, and Stability AI says it hasn't received it yet).

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On the other hand, just days ago, Shutterstock announced that it was extending its relationship with Meta to “use its datasets to develop, train and evaluate its machine learning capabilities.” This follows the company's announcement in October that it was partnering with OpenAI to integrate DALL-E 2 into its offerings, with plans to offer compensation to artists - and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company had obtained an imaging license from Shutterstock to form DALL-E starting in 2021.

At that time, the CEO of Getty Images said in an interview, "I think we're watching some organizations, individuals, and companies being reckless [...] I think the fact that these issues aren't being addressed is the problem here. In some cases they just get thrown to the wayside. I think it's dangerous. I don't think it's responsible. I think it might be illegal."

In a press release regarding the Stability AI lawsuit, Getty Images said it "believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to boost creative endeavours. As a result, Getty Images has provided licenses to innovators technologies for purposes related to the training of artificial intelligence systems while respecting intellectual property and personal rights. Stability AI has not requested such a license from Getty Images and, instead, we believe that 'it has chosen to ignore viable licensing options and longstanding legal protections in pursuit of its self-sustaining business interests."

Eshaghian pointed out that the last major overhaul of US copyright law dates back to 1976, long before the internet, not to mention the current generative AI revolution.

"As with any hugely disruptive technology, the law often lags behind, and when that happens you're going to see different parties approach the technology differently, as we're seeing now with the diametrically opposed approaches of Shutterstock and Getty" , did he declare. ..