Digital media giant Ziff Davis, the parent company of well-known outlets like IGN, CNET, PCMag, and Everyday Health, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement. As reported by The New York Times, Ziff Davis claims that OpenAI has been copying and using content from millions of its published articles each year without permission. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI intentionally created exact replicas of its work to train its AI models, ignoring explicit instructions that prevent data scraping through web crawler restrictions like the robots.txt file.
With a portfolio of over 45 media brands and a workforce of more than 3,800 employees, Ziff Davis is among the largest publishers to take legal action against OpenAI. The company stated that it publishes nearly 2 million new articles annually and receives over 292 million user visits every month. According to the lawsuit, OpenAI not only collected this content but also removed copyright notices from the material it gathered. Ziff Davis claims to have found hundreds of complete copies of its articles within a small sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset that was made publicly available.
While some media organizations such as The Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Vox Media, and The Financial Times have entered into licensing agreements with OpenAI, Ziff Davis has joined The New York Times, The Intercept, and several other publishers in pursuing legal action over the unauthorized use of their work. The lawsuit demands that the court prevent OpenAI from continuing to use Ziff Davis content and calls for the destruction of any datasets or AI models trained on that material.
In response, OpenAI has defended its practices. Spokesperson Jason Deutrom stated that OpenAI’s models are designed to enhance creativity, support scientific discovery, and assist millions of people worldwide. He emphasized that the company’s AI systems are trained on publicly available data under fair use principles. Ziff Davis, however, declined to provide further comment on the case.
