Not sure if you are asserting this but Just because an image is in the public domain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Stability has a right to use it for training. I have online content that is licensed as Creative Commons attribution, non commercial, share alike- it seems to me that using this for training would breach at least the non commercial terms of that license.

I'm talking about millions of old photos and art that have had their copyright expire. Getty sells them for $500 a pop.

Eg: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/people-and-t...

This isn't a photo, but there are millions of pics as well.

Fair enough. I agree that $500 is a big ask for public domain content, however there is still a service provided by Getty in surfacing this content. It seems fair to charge a fee for that convenience- after all, the consumer has an option to do that work and find it themselves if they value their time less than the cost and have the necessary knowledge. Kevin Kelly identifies this in his excellent article “better than free“ (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)

Getty asserts a related point in the claim- that the work done to build extensive metadata for the content (which Stability apparently used for training their models) is a valuable service in and of itself.

I understand not liking the price point here, but people sell copies of public domain works all the time; it's utterly mundane.

I'm upset that they're misrepresenting these works as being protected in order to make a sale to people who don't know better. It's a scam.