Ziff Davis, which operates over 45 media brands including PCMag and Everyday Health, asserts that OpenAI’s practices go beyond fair use. With a massive output of nearly 2 million articles annually and a monthly audience exceeding 292 million, the publisher argues its content is a foundational, yet stolen, component of ChatGPT’s responses. The filing highlights that even a limited sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset contained hundreds of full-text copies of Ziff Davis articles.
Ziff Davis Sues OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
The publisher behind IGN and CNET has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI firm systematically scraped millions of articles to train its models. By ignoring robots.txt directives and stripping copyright metadata, Ziff Davis claims the tech giant built its business on the unauthorized reproduction of its proprietary journalism.
The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction to block OpenAI from further exploiting this content and demands the destruction of any datasets or models trained on the publisher's intellectual property. While companies like The Atlantic and The Washington Post have opted for licensing agreements, Ziff Davis joins a growing coalition of publishers—including The New York Times and The Intercept—pursuing legal action. OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom dismissed the characterization of the technology, stating that ChatGPT is designed to enhance human creativity and medical research rather than merely reproduce source material.
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