From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is. As far as it's concerned, it's just a compositional element that happens to be in some images. Most "watermarks" Stable Diffusion produces are jumbles of colorized pixels which we can recognize as being evocative of a watermark, but which isn't the actual mark.
A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark", "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a watermark to be seen (though lots of water).
I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock photo containing something approximating a Getty watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo? I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the prompt.
We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of anything in Getty's library.
> From the model's perspective, it's not a distinct motif, that's the thing (and, it struggles quite a lot to reproduce the actual mark). The model doesn't have any concept of what a "watermark" is.
The court delivers the judgement, not the model.
If courts can find against musicians whilst accepting they 'unconsciously' plagiarised key elements of a song in their own completely different song played by different musicians based on maybe hearing it in the background somewhere, they can certainly find against the creators of a model which has a sufficiently strong and obvious dependency on Getty IP they imported to output reasonably close approximations of Getty watermarks.
A quick demo: I fed in the prompts "a getty watermark", "an image with a getty watermark", and "getty", and it spat out these: https://imgur.com/a/mKeFECG - not a watermark to be seen (though lots of water).
I was then able to generate an obviously-not-a-stock photo containing something approximating a Getty watermark, with the prompt "++++(stock photo) of a sea monster, art": https://imgur.com/a/mNC6XtQ - the heavily forced attention on the "stock photo" forces the model to say "okay, fine, what's something that means stock photo? I'll add this splorch of white that's kinda like what I've seen in a lot of things tagged as stock photos" and it incorporates that into the image as a to satisfy the prompt.
We can easily recognize that as attempting to mimic the Getty watermark, but it's not clearly recognizable as the mark itself, nor is the image likely to resemble much of anything in Getty's library.