Ziff Davis, the digital media powerhouse behind popular tech sites like PCMag, IGN, Mashable, and Lifehacker, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging widespread copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the US, marks one of the largest challenges yet to OpenAI’s content-gathering practices.
With over 45 digital brands, nearly 2 million new articles published annually, and a monthly audience of 292 million visitors, Ziff Davis is one of the biggest publishers to take legal action against the AI company. The media conglomerate employs approximately 3,800 people across its various digital properties.
In its 62-page complaint that was first reported by The New York Times, Ziff Davis accuses OpenAI of “intentionally and relentlessly” creating “exact copies” of its content without permission. The publisher claims OpenAI harvested its content despite explicit instructions in robots.txt files designed to prevent such scraping.
According to the lawsuit, Ziff Davis identified “hundreds of full copies” of its work in just a small sample of OpenAI’s publicly available WebText dataset.
The lawsuit further alleges that OpenAI removed copyright information from the scraped content and used these materials to train its AI models, including those powering ChatGPT.
Consequently, Ziff Davis is seeking damages—reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars—and is asking the court to halt OpenAI’s use of its content while demanding the destruction of any datasets or models containing its material.
OpenAI defended its practices in a statement, claiming its models “help enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research,” while maintaining they are “trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”
The lawsuit adds Ziff Davis to a growing list of media companies taking legal action against OpenAI, including The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and several Canadian media outlets.
Meanwhile, other publishers—including Vox Media, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post—have opted to sign content licensing agreements with the AI company.
