Ziff Davis and IGN file suit against OpenAI for copyright violations

Ziff Davis, IGN Entertainment, and Everyday Health Media sued Open AI in one of the most common disputes of modern AI. They were claiming copyright infringement.

In the lawsuit, the media companies alleged that copyright infringement was taking place as well as violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They also alleged unjust enrichment, trademark dilution and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. IGN and Everyday Health Media, divisions of Ziff Davis, are IGN.

Ziff-Davis alleged that “OpenAI has deliberately and relentlessly copied exact copies of Ziff-Davis works and created derivatives without Ziff-Davis’ authorization.”

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI copied text from Ziff Davis web sites without permission and violated Ziff’s written requests to stop. The lawsuit also claimed that OpenAI removed copyright management information for Ziff Davis’ works. The lawsuit alleges that Open AI then passes off this work as its own. In the lawsuit, OpenAI falsely attributed output to Ziff-Davis that was not Ziff-Davis content.

According to a spokesperson for OpenAI, “ChatGPT enhances human creativity, advances scientific discovery and medical discoveries, and enables hundreds of millions of individuals to improve their everyday lives.” Our models are based on public data and grounded in fair usage. They empower innovation. Association of Research Libraries gives some context to the dispute.

Ziff Davis stated that it has been publishing high-quality journalism since nearly 100 years. It grew from its roots as a publisher of Popular Aviation, to its current stewardship over 45 diverse digital publications and internet brands including IGN Mashable CNET ZDNet PCMag Lifehacker BabyCenter and Everyday Health. Ziff Davis produces over 2 million articles and article updates each year, including more than 5,000 product reviews. It owns the exclusive rights to these articles.

Ziff-Davis also claims that OpenAI trained their AI models on Ziff-Davis’s work, despite Ziff-Davis telling web crawlers to not scrape its data Using a robots.txt