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April 27, 2025
Media conglomerate Ziff Davis has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging massive copyright infringement related to the training of AI models like ChatGPT. Ziff Davis, owner of well-known online brands such as IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNET, PCMag, and Everyday Health, accuses OpenAI of systematically copying content from its websites, bypassing technical protection mechanisms, and removing copyright notices. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, includes claims of copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unjust enrichment, and trademark dilution.
The complaint documents how OpenAI's web crawler, GPTBot, allegedly ignored robots.txt files that prohibit content collection. According to court documents, crawler activity intensified after Ziff Davis sent a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024. Ziff Davis claims OpenAI used specialized software to remove copyright information from the articles. As evidence, the publicly available dataset "WebText," which contains Ziff Davis content without attribution, is cited. Analysis shows that Ziff Davis material appears millions of times in the training data, at a frequency exceeding the company's normal web presence.
Ziff Davis's own tests show that OpenAI's models can reproduce exact passages from its articles, even offline, suggesting direct copying of training data. With internet access enabled, the models actively access Ziff Davis content. The lawsuit also describes how OpenAI's products can misrepresent Ziff Davis content by creating inaccurate summaries, misquoting sources, generating fake article links, or "hallucinating" facts and attributing them to Ziff Davis publications. The company argues that these practices dilute the media group's brand and damage its reputation as a trusted source of information. Independent studies have also found that chatbots can misrepresent news content or cite false sources.
Ziff Davis describes AI-generated content as a fundamental threat to its business, arguing that it directly competes with original articles and diverts user traffic—thus undermining advertising and commission-based revenue streams. The company claims OpenAI profits from Ziff Davis's investments and work without compensation, while simultaneously entering into licensing agreements with other publishers. The lawsuit seeks damages, attorney's fees, and a permanent injunction. Specifically, Ziff Davis demands the destruction of all OpenAI training datasets and AI models containing or derived from the company's copyrighted works. According to the complaint, OpenAI rejected Ziff Davis's attempts to negotiate a licensing agreement before the lawsuit.
OpenAI and other AI companies have recently entered into largely opaque licensing agreements with select media organizations. These agreements, often retroactive, appear aimed at preempting potential litigation over the use of content in AI training. These practices effectively position AI companies as gatekeepers, giving them the power to decide which publishers benefit financially. The concentration of such power could pose a greater threat to media diversity than the current reliance on search engines like Google, as users rarely leave chatbot platforms. The Ziff Davis case is one of many ongoing legal disputes between content providers and AI companies. OpenAI is currently involved in more than 15 such disputes.
