Ziff Davis, the parent company of popular digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of copyright infringement. According to The New York Times, Ziff Davis claims that OpenAI intentionally copied its content without permission, using the material to train its AI models, including ChatGPT.
In the lawsuit, Ziff Davis argues that OpenAI scraped its data despite explicit instructions not to do so, as indicated by the company’s robots.txt file. The company also alleges that OpenAI removed copyright information from the content it collected. Ziff Davis, which owns over 45 media brands and employs more than 3,800 people, publishes nearly 2 million articles annually and receives 292 million user visits per month.
Joining the List of Media Giants Suing OpenAI
Ziff Davis is one of the largest media publishers to take legal action against OpenAI. The lawsuit follows similar actions from other major outlets, including The New York Times, The Intercept, and AlterNet, among others. Unlike companies such as Vox Media, The Associated Press, and The Financial Times, which have entered into content licensing agreements with OpenAI, Ziff Davis has chosen to take a more adversarial stance, accusing the AI firm of exploiting its intellectual property.
Ziff Davis alleges that OpenAI has “copied, reproduced, and stored” content from its outlets, which the AI company then uses to generate responses in ChatGPT. In its complaint, Ziff Davis claims to have identified “hundreds of full copies” of its content within a small portion of OpenAI’s WebText dataset, which was made publicly available.
Ziff Davis Seeks to Halt OpenAI’s Use of Its Content
In addition to seeking damages, Ziff Davis is asking the court to stop OpenAI from further using its content. The company also demands that OpenAI destroy any datasets or models containing its works.
An OpenAI spokesperson, Jason Deutrom, responded to the lawsuit by defending the company’s practices. “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives,” Deutrom said. “Our models empower innovation and are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use.”
