Parent company of CNET, Mashable, PCMag sues OpenAI: Here's why
What's the story
Ziff Davis, the parent company of several popular digital media outlets such as CNET, PCMag, IGN, Mashable, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI—the popular AI firm behind ChatGPT.
In the lawsuit, Ziff Davis alleges that OpenAI "intentionally and relentlessly" created "exact copies" of its outlets' content without prior consent.
Copyright dispute
Allegations of copyright infringement and data scraping
Ziff Davis claims OpenAI trained its AI models on its work, despite explicit instructions against data scraping.
The company had directed web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file.
It also alleges that OpenAI stripped copyright information from the content it collected.
These allegations are the basis of Ziff Davis's lawsuit against OpenAI.
Presence
Ziff Davis: A major player in the media industry
Ziff Davis is a major player in the digital media space, owning more than 45 brands and employing over 3,800 people.
The company publishes nearly two million new articles every year and receives over 292 million user visits every month.
This makes it one of the largest publishers to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.
Legal alliance
Other media outlets in legal action
Ziff Davis isn't the only one suing OpenAI. Other media organizations like The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and a group of Canadian media companies have also sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.
The collective action underscores growing concerns over AI companies using copyrighted material without proper permission or attribution.
Action
Ziff Davis seeks court intervention against OpenAI
In its lawsuit, Ziff Davis has accused OpenAI of "copying, reproducing, and storing" its outlets' work for use in ChatGPT.
The company claims to have identified hundreds of full copies of the body text from its works within OpenAI's publicly accessible WebText dataset.
Ziff Davis is seeking a court order to stop OpenAI from using its works and delete any datasets/models containing its content.