In a major decision for AI copyright regulation, a US judge has denied several AI companies’ appeal to dismiss a class-action copyright lawsuit.

Following the development of advanced AI-art generators, visual artists and creators began to claim that AI-generated art closely resembled their own, sparking concerns over data-scraping and copyright infringement.

Artists, writers, and other creators began to claim that AI companies had used their images to train their AI content, noticing similarities in styles of the AI’s output. Users also noted that they could prompt AI image generators to create images in the style of artists, despite these artists not providing consent.

This drove several artists to file a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI, claiming that these companies’ used the artists copyrighted images to train their AI models, without the artists consent, let alone compensation.

In the initial lawsuit, which was filed February 2023, US Judge William Orrick upheld the copyright infringement claim against Stability AI, but dismissed many of the other complaints asking for further detail from their attorneys.

The AI companies involved, on the other hand, argued for the entire case to be thrown out, denying any copyright infringement, instead saying that the complainants had not stated a valid claim on the Digital US Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

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But in the judge’s latest statements, Orrick dismissed the companies’ points based on new information provided by the artists’ lawyers.

The artists may now continue pursuing their claim under the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act, the main trademark statute in the US.

“We won BIG as the judge allowed ALL of our claims on copyright infringement to proceed and we historically move on The Lanham Act (trade dress) claims! We can now proceed onto discovery!” one of the plaintiffs, Karla Ortiz, wrote in a post on X.

As other AI copyright infringement cases come to the foray, this decision could be a turning point as governments and courts grapple with the new AI age and its many pitfalls.