Ziff Davis, a prominent owner of digital media brands including CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, has initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement, as initially reported by The New York Times. The digital publisher accuses OpenAI of creating “exact copies” of content from its brands without securing proper authorization.
The lawsuit asserts that OpenAI utilized Ziff Davis’s materials to train its AI models, despite explicit instructions to web crawlers not to access its data through a robots.txt file. The claim further suggests that OpenAI removed copyright information from the content it collected.
With ownership of over 45 media brands and a workforce exceeding 3,800 employees, Ziff Davis stands out as one of the largest publishers to take legal action against OpenAI to date. The company reports publishing nearly 2 million new articles annually, attracting an average of over 292 million user visits each month.
In contrast to Ziff Davis’s legal strategy, several other media organizations, including Vox Media (the parent of Technology News), The Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post, have established content licensing agreements with OpenAI. Ziff Davis joins the ranks of The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and various Canadian media entities in their grievances against OpenAI concerning copyright issues.
The complaint specifies that OpenAI has “copied, reproduced, and stored” the content from Ziff Davis’s properties to generate responses within ChatGPT. “Ziff Davis has identified hundreds of full copies of the body text of Ziff Davis Works in merely the small sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset that it made publicly available,” the lawsuit states.
Ziff Davis is seeking a court order that would prohibit OpenAI from continuing to utilize its content, along with demands for the destruction of any datasets or AI models containing Ziff Davis material.
In response, OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom remarked, “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.” Ziff Davis has opted not to comment publicly on the matter.
