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Ziff Davis, the owner of several digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement, as first reported by The New York Times. 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.
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.
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.
Ziff Davis alleges that OpenAI has “copied, reproduced, and stored” its outlets’ work, which it uses to create responses in ChatGPT. “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.
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.
“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.
