Ziff Davis and IGN Battle OpenAI in Groundbreaking Copyright Lawsuit

Ziff Davis Sues OpenAI Over Alleged Copyright Infringement and Unauthorized Use of Content

In one of the more prevalent conflicts of contemporary AI, Ziff Davis, IGN Entertainment, and Everyday Health Media have lodged a lawsuit against Open AI for copyright violation.

The legal action from the media firms claims copyright infringement, breaches of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unjust enrichment, and trademark dilution. IGN and Everyday Health Media are subsidiaries of Ziff Davis.

Ziff Davis contended, “OpenAI has deliberately and persistently replicated exact duplicates and generated derivatives of Ziff Davis works without Ziff Davis’ consent.

The litigation asserted that OpenAI has knowingly reproduced the text from Ziff Davis’ websites without authorization and transgressed Ziff Davis’ written requests to cease. It also claimed that OpenAI removed copyright management information from Ziff Davis works. Subsequently, it alleges that Open AI misattributes this work as its own. The lawsuit states that OpenAI erroneously ascribes output to Ziff Davis that is not Ziff Davis content.

A representative for OpenAI remarked, “ChatGPT aids in enhancing human creativity, propelling scientific discovery and medical research, and empowering hundreds of millions of individuals to elevate their daily existence. Our models foster innovation and are based on publicly accessible data, grounded in fair use.”

The Association of Research Libraries offers additional context regarding the conflict.

Ziff Davis indicated that it has delivered high-quality journalism for nearly a century, evolving from its beginnings as the publisher of Popular Aviation to overseeing over 45 distinct digital media publications and internet brands, including IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNet, PCMag, Lifehacker, BabyCenter, and Everyday Health.

Annually, Ziff Davis generates nearly 2 million fresh articles and updates—including over 5,000 product reviews—in which it possesses exclusive rights.

Ziff Davis also asserts that OpenAI trained its AI models on its content despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to extract its data using a robots.txt file.