Ziff Davis sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

Ziff Davis, the media conglomerate that owns PCMag, IGN, CNET, ZDNet and Lifehacker among other outlets, sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in Delaware, alleging copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unjust enrichment and trademark dilution. The 62-page complaint accused OpenAI of “intentionally and relentlessly” reproducing exact copies of Ziff Davis articles and generating derivative works from them without licence or compensation, in order to train and operate ChatGPT.

The suit sought damages reported by people familiar with the filing at hundreds of millions of dollars. OpenAI’s standing defence in the wave of publisher suits it faces — that its training draws on publicly available material and falls under fair use — applied here as well, though the company had not yet filed a substantive response at the time of filing.

Ziff Davis’s outlet count made the suit one of the larger publisher actions against OpenAI by volume of properties covered, joining suits already filed by The New York Times and other news organisations in a broader legal contest over whether training large language models on copyrighted journalism requires a licence. The case added to a growing docket of US copyright litigation against AI companies that, by some trackers, numbered several dozen suits by this point, with no appellate ruling yet settling the underlying fair-use question.