In one of the more common disputes of modern AI, Ziff Davis, IGN Entertainment and Everyday Health Media have sued Open AI for copyright infringement.
The lawsuit from the media companies alleged copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unjust enrichment and trademark dilution. IGN and Everyday Health Media are divisions of Ziff Davis.
Ziff Davis alleged, “OpenAI has intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works without Ziff Davis’ authorization.
The lawsuit said OpenAI has knowingly copied the text of Ziff Davis’ web sites without authorization and violated Ziff Davis’ written demands to stop. It also said OpenAI stripped out copyright management information from Ziff Davis works. And then it alleges Open AI passes this work off as its own. The lawsuit OpenAI falsely attributes output to Ziff Davis that is not Ziff Davis content.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said, “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”
The Association of Research Libraries provides some context on the dispute.
Ziff Davis said it has published high-quality journalism for nearly 100 years, growing from its roots as the publisher of Popular Aviation to its current stewardship of over 45 diverse digital media publications and internet brands, including IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNet, PCMag, Lifehacker, BabyCenter, and Everyday Health.
Each year, Ziff Davis produces nearly 2 million new articles and article updates—including over 5,000 product reviews—in which it owns the exclusive rights.
Ziff Davis also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work even though Ziff Davis told web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file.