Li Yunkai v. Liu Yuanchun, Beijing Internet Court Civil Judgment (2023) Jing 0491 Min Chu No. 11279. (official English translation.)
On 24 February 2023, Li Yunkai, plaintiff, generated a picture by inputting prompts to Stable Diffusion, an open source software, and then published the picture on Xiaohongshu, a social media platform, under the title “Spring Breeze Brings Tenderness”. Plaintiff later discovered that Ms Liu Yuanchun, defendant, a blogger on the Baijiahao platform, had used the picture in an article titled “Love in March, in the Peach Blossoms”, published on 2 March 2023 without his permission.
On 27 November 2023, the Court found that plaintiff had incurred a degree of intellectual investment, including “designing the presentation of the character, selecting prompt words, arranging the order of prompt words, setting parameters, and selecting the picture that he wanted”. The picture therefore reflected plaintiff’s intellectual investment, such that the element of “intellectual achievement” for originality was met.