A Bill for Her Own Photo
Getty Images, the company that billed a photographer $120 for a picture she gave away, filed for bankruptcy last week. The one thing a court agreed AI took from it was the watermark.
Getty Images filed for bankruptcy last Wednesday, October 21, in Delaware. It's the prepackaged kind: the Getty family and Koch put in up to $533 million and take the company private, and public shareholders (it listed in 2022) are expected to get nothing (CNBC). In March it had warned it might not make it, citing debt, lawsuits and AI. The library it sits on holds more than 477 million pictures.
It is that Getty. Mark Getty, J. Paul Getty's grandson, started it in London in 1995 with Jonathan Klein, and he's the one quoted ever since calling intellectual property "the oil of the 21st century." The plan was to own the wells. Hulton's 15 million British press photographs in 1996, then Archive Photos, iStock, WireImage, Redferns, and on down the list.
Carol M. Highsmith went the other way. She has spent forty years photographing America and giving it away: since 1992 she has handed the Library of Congress close to 100,000 pictures with no rights reserved, for anyone to use. Then a letter arrived on Getty's behalf accusing her of copyright infringement for showing one of her own photographs on her own website. Pay $120. In 2016 she sued Getty and Alamy for $1 billion over 18,755 of her photos being licensed out for money, a "generous gift to the American people," her complaint said, that the defendants had "apparently misappropriated." The judge threw out the copyright claims. She had given the pictures away, so she had given up the right to complain about who charged for them. The rest settled.
Then the machines showed up. In January 2023 Getty sued Stability AI for training Stable Diffusion on its pictures, and early versions of the model would sometimes paint a smeared Getty Images watermark into the corner of what it made. Last November the High Court in London threw out the copyright case: the model doesn't keep copies. Getty won on one thing, narrowly. The watermark.