Ziff Davis files major copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

Ziff Davis, the digital media company behind over 45 properties including CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Mashable, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging copyright infringement, marking another significant legal challenge for the AI company. The lawsuit, filed on April 24, 2025, in Delaware federal court, joins similar legal actions from other publishers like The New York Times.

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.

The 62-page complaint claims that OpenAI has "intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works" without authorization, violating copyright laws and diluting the publisher's trademarks. 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.

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.

Specific allegations and evidence presented

The lawsuit outlines eight main allegations against OpenAI, including:

1. Copy the text of Ziff Davis Works from Ziff Davis's websites without authorization;
2. Violate and circumvent Ziff Davis's explicit written demands and technological controls;
3. Strip out key copyright management information ("CMI") from Ziff Davis Works;
4. Use copied Ziff Davis Works to develop LLMs;
5. Use copied Ziff Davis Works to operate LLMs and LLM-based products and services, which it provides to third parties;
6. Reproduce, distribute, display, perform, and make available for access, Ziff Davis Works verbatim and in close paraphrase and derivative form (but with CMI removed);
7. Facilitate and enable the reproduction, distribution, display and performance of Ziff Davis Works by third parties
8. Falsely attribute output to Ziff Davis that is not Ziff Davis content, and falsely attribute Ziff Davis content to other parties

Ziff Davis currently owns more than 45 media brands and has over 3,800 employees, making it one of the biggest publishers to sue OpenAI so far. In the lawsuit, the company said it publishes nearly 2 million new articles every year, and averages over 292 million user visits each month.

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.

In the complaint, Ziff Davis provides examples of its content being used without permission: "Ziff Davis has identified hundreds of full copies of the body text of Ziff Davis Works in merely the small sample of OpenAI's WebText dataset that it made publicly available," the company claims.

OpenAI's response and defense

OpenAI has defended its practices, maintaining that its use of content is protected under fair use doctrine. A spokesman 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.

"ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives," OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom said in a statement to The Verge. "Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." Ziff Davis declined to comment.

Media industry's response to AI

The lawsuit comes amid ongoing debate over how AI companies should handle copyrighted content for training purposes. Many publishers have taken different approaches to this issue:

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 A.I. 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.

Some outlets, including The Verge parent company Vox Media, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, have signed content licensing agreements with OpenAI. However, Ziff Davis is joining The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and a group of Canadian media companies on the list of those suing OpenAI over copyright infringement.

Several lawsuits against OpenAI are now working their way through the courts, with This month, a U.S. judicial panel consolidated several claims against OpenAI, including the one brought by The Times.

What Ziff Davis is seeking

Ziff Davis is asking the court to stop OpenAI from "exploiting" its works, as well as to destroy any dataset or models containing its content. The company is reportedly seeking damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in its lawsuit, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Timeline

• December 2022: ChatGPT launched to the public
• December 2023: The New York Times files lawsuit against OpenAI
• Early 2024: Multiple publishers begin signing licensing deals with OpenAI
• April 2024: OpenAI announces "approach to data and AI" but no concrete opt-out tool
• April 24, 2025: Ziff Davis files lawsuit against OpenAI
• April 2025: U.S. judicial panel consolidates several claims against OpenAI