# Ziff Davis, Owner of IGN and CNET, Sues OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement

## Ziff Davis, Owner of IGN and CNET, Sues OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement

Ziff Davis, the media conglomerate behind popular digital outlets like *CNET*, *PCMag*, *IGN*, and *Everyday Health*, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI giant of copyright infringement. The lawsuit, first reported by *The New York Times*, alleges that OpenAI “intentionally and relentlessly” created “exact copies” of Ziff Davis’s content without permission.

According to the legal filing, Ziff Davis claims that OpenAI trained its AI models on their copyrighted material despite explicit instructions in their robots.txt file, which prohibits web crawlers from scraping their data. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI even removed copyright information from the scraped content.

Ziff Davis is a major player in the digital publishing landscape, owning over 45 media brands and employing over 3,800 people. The company claims to publish approximately 2 million new articles annually, attracting an average of 292 million user visits each month. This makes Ziff Davis one of the largest publishers to take legal action against OpenAI regarding copyright concerns.

While some media organizations, including Vox Media (parent company of *The Verge*), *The Associated Press*, *The Atlantic*, *The Financial Times*, and *The Washington Post*, have opted for content licensing agreements with OpenAI, Ziff Davis joins a growing list of companies pursuing legal recourse. This list includes *The New York Times*, *The Intercept*, *Raw Story*, *AlterNet*, and a coalition of Canadian media companies.

Ziff Davis asserts that OpenAI “copied, reproduced, and stored” their content, using it to generate responses within ChatGPT. They point to the discovery of “hundreds of full copies of the body text of Ziff Davis Works” within a small, publicly available sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset as evidence.

The media giant is seeking a court order to prevent OpenAI from further “exploiting” their copyrighted material and to mandate the destruction of any datasets or AI models that contain their content.

In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom stated to *The Verge* that, “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.” Ziff Davis declined to comment.

The lawsuit underscores the ongoing debate and legal challenges surrounding the use of copyrighted material in the training of large language models and raises critical questions about fair use, copyright enforcement, and the future of content creation in the age of AI.