Ziff Davis Sues OpenAI for Copyright Infringement, Escalating AI-Media Tensions

IGN and CNET owner Ziff Davis sues OpenAI

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Ziff Davis, the owner of several digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement, as first reported by The New York Times. In the lawsuit, the digital media company accuses OpenAI of "intentionally and relentlessly" creating "exact copies" of its outlets' works without permission. The company also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file, adding that OpenAI allegedly removed copyright information from the content it sucks up.

Why We're Suing OpenAI

OpenAI is facing another lawsuit for copyright infringement, and this time it comes from our parent company, Ziff Davis, which accuses OpenAI of training its AI on our content without authorization or payment. OpenAI ignored Ziff Davis' requests to stop using its copyright-protected content, according to a 62-page complaint filed in Delaware district court on Thursday. OpenAI continues to train its models with Ziff's content, and has "relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives" of articles, the suit says. Ziff reached out to OpenAI in May 2024 and followed up in August 2024, asking for a meeting to discuss the issue, but "OpenAI rebuffed the invitation to meet," the suit says. Ziff Davis is one of the largest publishers in the US. It owns around 45 media brands, including CNET, Everyday Health, IGN, Lifehacker, Mashable, and PCMag. It publishes nearly 2 million new articles and article updates per year, including over 5,000 product reviews. When someone asks ChatGPT for a tech product recommendation, the chatbot relies on information from PCMag and others. But it does not consistently link to its sources, or direct users to them. So, OpenAI benefits from the content while the outlets lose traffic and revenue. "Ziff Davis's content is supported by rigorous research, reporting, and product testing, and its experienced writers and editors incorporate the results of these efforts into original stories," the complaint says. OpenAI argues that anything published on the web is "fair use" and the ability to use it is essential for innovation and maintaining US competitiveness in AI, Ars Technica reports. Ziff Davis updated the backend of its website (its robots.txt file) with a few lines of code that tell OpenAI's webcrawler, GPTBot, to stop scraping its pages, a common practice. However, GPTBot continued to do so. "This graph shows GPTBot activity during two months in 2024 on one of Ziff Davis's sites that had implemented the technical measures prescribed by OpenAI to block GPTBot," the filing reads. The spike in May "occurred contemporaneously with OpenAI's public statement that it had "recently begun training its next frontier model." ChatGPT's answers also falsely attribute information to Ziff Davis that it did not publish, and, vice versa, according to the complaint. "OpenAI, by its actions, has flouted copyright and trademark law and discredited its own pretext for that flouting," it says. The New York Times is also suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, as are a group of Canadian news organizations. Others, like News Corp. and Conde Nast, are going after OpenAI rival Perplexity on similar grounds. However, other major media companies have gone the other direction, and signed licensing deals with OpenAI to use their content. That includes The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and -- as of this week -- The Washington Post. OpenAI has not extended the same offer to Ziff Davis, and has not agreed to a meeting to discuss it, but continues using the company's content without authorization. It might be in the best interest of OpenAI, and the entire AI industry, to compensate all publications fairly. This would incentivize those who create content scraped by AI models to keep doing it, and at a high standard, resulting in a more reliable AI-generated output. The media industry is sensitive to new technologies undercutting its business model, particularly after the shift to online journalism coincided with the downfall of local news and printed papers. Many outlets are currently monitoring the impact of Google's AI-powered responses, which reduce traffic to sites it was originally designed to help the public find.

Publisher Ziff Davis sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

April 24 (Reuters) - Digital media publisher Ziff Davis (ZD.O), opens new tab sued OpenAI in Delaware federal court on Thursday, accusing the Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O), opens new tab artificial-intelligence company of misusing its publications to train the model behind popular chatbot ChatGPT. Ziff Davis argues that OpenAI "intentionally and relentlessly" exploited copyrighted content for its AI systems, according to a copy of the lawsuit provided by the media company. "OpenAI seeks to move fast and break things on the assumption that the federal courts will not be able to effectively redress content owners' sometimes existential concerns before it is too late," the complaint said. The new lawsuit adds to a web of high-stakes copyright cases brought by news outlets, authors, visual artists and others against OpenAI and other technology companies for allegedly misusing thousands of copyrighted works to train their generative AI systems without permission. Ziff Davis' publications include tech news outlets ZDNet, PCMag, CNET and IGN and advice website Lifehacker. Other news publishers that have sued AI companies for copyright infringement include the New York Times and Dow Jones. OpenAI and other defendants, including Google and Meta Platforms, have argued that their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content. An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday that its AI models "empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." A spokesperson for Ziff Davis declined to comment on the lawsuit. Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Gregorio Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Blake Brittain Thomson Reuters Blake Brittain reports on intellectual property law, including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets, for Reuters Legal. He has previously written for Bloomberg Law and Thomson Reuters Practical Law and practiced as an attorney.

Ziff Davis and IGN sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

Ziff Davis, IGN Entertainment and Everyday Health Media are suing Open AI. Image Credit: Ziff Davis etc. In one of the more common disputes of modern AI, Ziff Davis, IGN Entertainment and Everyday Health Media have sued Open AI for copyright infringement. The lawsuit from the media companies alleged copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unjust enrichment and trademark dilution. IGN and Everyday Health Media are divisions of Ziff Davis. Ziff Davis alleged, "OpenAI has intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works without Ziff Davis' authorization. The lawsuit said OpenAI has knowingly copied the text of Ziff Davis' web sites without authorization and violated Ziff Davis' written demands to stop. It also said OpenAI stripped out copyright management information from Ziff Davis works. And then it alleges Open AI passes this work off as its own. The lawsuit OpenAI falsely attributes output to Ziff Davis that is not Ziff Davis content. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, "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." The Association of Research Libraries provides some context on the dispute. Ziff Davis said it has published high-quality journalism for nearly 100 years, growing from its roots as the publisher of Popular Aviation to its current stewardship of over 45 diverse digital media publications and internet brands, including IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNet, PCMag, Lifehacker, BabyCenter, and Everyday Health. Each year, Ziff Davis produces nearly 2 million new articles and article updates -- including over 5,000 product reviews -- in which it owns the exclusive rights. Ziff Davis also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work even though Ziff Davis told web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file.

How Ziff Davis's lawsuit against OpenAI redraws the battle lines with the media

While The Times and Ziff aren't alone in their legal efforts against OpenAI, it's informative to compare the two complaints, filed almost 16 months apart, to get an understanding of how the stakes of the AI-media cold war have evolved. AI technology has progressed considerably and we now have a much greater understanding of AI substitution risk -- the fancy name for AI summarization of publisher content. Ziff's lawsuit gives us a better idea of how the AI sausage is made these days and can tell us just how much other AI players should be sweating. For starters, Ziff points to what has become table stakes in most of these lawsuits: the act of scraping content, storing copies of that content in a database, and then serving up either a "derivative work" (summaries) or the content itself as inherently violative of copyright. OpenAI has maintained, however clumsily at times, that its harvesting of content on the web to train models falls under fair use, a key exception to copyright law that has supported some instances of mass digital copying in the past. That's the central conflict to all these cases, but Ziff's action goes in some novel directions that point to how things have changed since ChatGPT first arrived: Ziff runs a few more yards with the copyright ball, claiming that OpenAI deliberately stripped copyright management information (CMI) from Ziff content. This is a bit of a technicality -- essentially it means ChatGPT answers often don't include bylines, the name of the publication, and other metadata that would identify the source. However, stripping out CMI from content and then distributing it under your own banner is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), giving the filing more teeth.

Publisher of PCMag and Mashable Sues OpenAI

Ziff Davis, the digital publisher behind Mashable, PCMag and Lifehacker, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI platform used its content without permission to train its models. The company is seeking significant financial damages. This action follows similar concerns raised by other media companies regarding AI's use of copyrighted material.Ziff Davis, the digital publisher behind tech sites like Mashable, PCMag and Lifehacker, sued OpenAI on Thursday, joining a wave of media companies accusing the artificial intelligence giant of stealing its content. Ziff Davis is one of the largest publishers in the United States, with more than 45 sites globally that together attract an average of 292 million visitors per month, and is among the biggest media companies pressing a claim against OpenAI. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit's claims.) In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has "intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works," infringing on the publisher's copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used Ziff Davis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular ChatGPT chatbot. "OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis's intellectual property rights and the law," the complaint says. The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in its lawsuit, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement that its models were "grounded in fair use," referring to the legal standard for use of copyrighted material. "ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives," the statement said. Many executives in the publishing industry, which was profoundly disrupted by the widespread adoption of technologies such as search and social media, have regarded the growing popularity of artificial intelligence with increasing unease. Powerful AI systems built by companies like OpenAI have been trained on copyrighted content, drawing an outcry from many media companies. Those companies have generally responded in one of two ways: striking deals to license their content to companies like OpenAI for millions of dollars, as in the case with News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, or filing lawsuits to seek damages and reaffirm their rights to intellectual property. Many of those claims are still working their way through courts. This month, a US judicial panel consolidated several claims against OpenAI, including the one brought by the Times. Executives at Ziff Davis have been considering for months which path to take, one of the people said. The company decided to sue, in part, in the hope that other publishers would follow. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

IGN owner Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI

Digital media publisher Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI, claiming that the AI company is guilty of copyright infringement. Plaintiffs include Ziff Davis, IGN, and Everyday Health Media. In the lawsuit, which was first reported on by The New York Times and was filed in a federal court in Delaware, Ziff Davis claims that millions of articles created by Ziff Davis' many publications were unlawfully used in training the bot ChatGPT. The lawsuit claims OpenAI has "intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of ZiffDavis Works without Ziff Davis's authorisation." Via a response to Reuters, an OpenAI spokesperson stated that its AI models are "trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." As AI continues its rise, and more bots are being trained in murky waters, this case involving Ziff Davis is but one of a series of suits emerging against AI companies as they seek to train more chatbots.

Ziff Davis Accuses OpenAI Misused Its Content for AI Training

Ziff Davis, the media company behind popular tech sites like PCMag, IGN, and CNET, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI firm of copyright infringement. The company claims that OpenAI used its content without permission to train AI models like ChatGPT. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Delaware, alleges that OpenAI "intentionally and relentlessly" copied and used articles from Ziff Davis brands, even though the company had taken steps to prevent such scraping. According to the complaint, OpenAI ignored robots.txt instructions on Ziff Davis websites and even removed copyright notices from the material it used. Ziff Davis, which owns over 45 digital media outlets and publishes around 2 million articles each year, claims that OpenAI reproduced its work in its training datasets, which then reflected in ChatGPT's responses. The company has asked the court to stop OpenAI from using its content and to destroy any models or data containing its copyrighted material. "OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis's intellectual property rights and the law," the complaint states. The publisher also said that in a small sample of OpenAI's WebText dataset, it found hundreds of full articles from its platforms, suggesting widespread misuse. In response to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom defended the company, saying, "ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives." He added that "Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." Ziff Davis is one of the largest media companies to file legal action against OpenAI. Other notable entities, including The New York Times, The Intercept, and a group of Canadian publishers, have also filed lawsuits against OpenAI over similar claims. Meanwhile, some media outlets, such as The Associated Press and The Washington Post, have opted to license their content to OpenAI through paid agreements. Meanwhile, several media organisations have opted for licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing the AI company to legally use their content in exchange for compensation. These partnerships include: In April 2025, The Washington Post signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI, allowing ChatGPT to provide summaries, quotes, and direct links to the newspaper's articles. This agreement covers topics such as politics, global affairs, and business, with proper attribution. In June 2024, Time Inc. entered into a licensing deal granting OpenAI access to its archives, enabling the company to use Time's content for AI model training and generating responses in products like ChatGPT. In May 2024, News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and other major publications, signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI. This deal allows OpenAI to use articles from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and others for AI model development. In January 2025, OpenAI partnered with Axios to fund four new local newsrooms as part of a content licensing agreement. This collaboration aims to expand local news coverage. The parent company of outlets like The Verge and Vox, Vox Media entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI, allowing it to use content from its various brands to train AI models. The Atlantic signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024, allowing the company to use its articles for training purposes and content generation, ensuring compensation for its intellectual property. The AP has entered into a deal to license its news articles to OpenAI, marking a significant move by a major news organisation to capitalise on the growing AI industry. These agreements illustrate how media companies are navigating the evolving AI landscape by monetising their intellectual property and ensuring compensation for the use of their content. The Ziff Davis lawsuit is part of a broader legal reckoning that could reshape how AI companies access and use copyrighted material. As AI models become more advanced, they rely heavily on vast datasets, often scraped from the open internet, to learn and generate responses. Media companies, authors, and artists argue that this practice exploits their work without consent or compensation, threatening both their revenue models and creative control. This issue is especially urgent given the mixed outcomes emerging from courts. For instance, recently, AI company Anthropic secured a significant legal win in the U.S. after a federal judge denied a request from music publishers to block it from using copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot, Claude. The court emphasised that stopping AI training at this early stage could stifle innovation, setting an important -- and controversial -- precedent. The contrast between cases like Anthropic's and the growing number of lawsuits against OpenAI -- from The New York Times to authors like George R.R. Martin -- highlights the legal uncertainty surrounding AI training practices. Depending on how courts rule, companies may either be required to license all third-party content or be permitted to continue under the doctrine of fair use. The outcomes could define how intellectual property law evolves in the age of generative AI, shaping everything from journalism and entertainment to how we access and create knowledge. In essence, these lawsuits are not just about copyright -- they're about the future economics of information, creativity, and machine intelligence.