IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Another publisher takes on OpenAI over use of works as training data, (Apr 30, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

Ziff Davis is the latest in a wide range of content owners to take on the company behind ChatGPT.

Publishing giant Ziff Davis has joined the chorus of publishers, writers, and other creators who demand that the backers of ChatGPT stop using their copyright works to train their models. In an unusually detailed complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, Ziff Davis alleges that in addition to ingesting its copyrighted articles for training purposes, the creators of ChatGPT have also circumvented Ziff Davis’s technological controls, stripped out copyright management information, used copyrighted content to train its AI models, reproduced Ziff Davis articles verbatim or in a closely paraphrased manner, and falsely attributed to Ziff Davis material that is not the publisher’s content (Ziff Davis, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-00501-UNA (D. Del. filed Apr. 24, 2025)).

The lawsuit was brought against OpenAI and its wide range of affiliates behind ChatGPT and other large language model-based artificial intelligence programs. The 62-page complaint, brought by the company behind publications such as IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNET, PCMag, Lifehacker, BabyCenter, and Everyday Health, alleges that OpenAI “seeks to move fast and break things on the assumption that the federal courts will not be able to effectively redress content owners’ sometimes existential concerns before it is too late.” The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI exploits infringing copies of Ziff Davis works during at least five stages of its development and operation of LLMs and LLM software and services.

First, the complaint alleges, OpenAI has “copied and continues to copy Ziff Davis’s written works into training datasets” by exploiting existing pools of scraped website content and directly scraping content from Ziff Davis websites. In the process, the complaint alleged OpenAI “deliberately circumvented and continues to deliberately circumvent technical copy protection measures” in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The complaint also asserts that OpenAI “has created and continues to create copies or derivatives” of Ziff Davis works in encoded form in its LLMs in the course of training those models. Ziff Davis further alleges that OpenAI has “generated and continues to generate copies or derivatives” of Ziff Davis works in outputs from its LLM products. OpenAI “has saved and continues to save copies of outputs from its LLM chatbot products” containing Ziff Davis works to use to train LLMs and improve LLM products, according to the complaint. Finally, the publishing company alleges OpenAI “has scraped and copied, and continues to scrape and copy,” the content of Ziff Davis works “in order to create additional LLM inputs and outputs when utilizing RAG functionality.”

The lawsuit also alleges that OpenAI’s products “often generate misleading responses that falsely purport to summarize or replicate Ziff Davis content.” These responses can be misleading, the complaint asserts because a response may cite to a specific Ziff Davis article but fail to give a citation, cite a different article, or give an inaccessible citation. Even when the correct Ziff Davis article is cited, the complaint asserts, “it may be falsely described by omission of relevant content, by addition or ‘hallucination’ of facts attributed to but not from the article, or by addition of false statements of fact.” Ziff Davis asserts that OpenAI has engaged in trademark dilution in violation of federal and state law by knowingly providing misleading or false summaries of Ziff Davis articles and other content alongside the Registered Marks in output from LLM-based products, and by misattributing third-party content as originating with Ziff Davis.

The lawsuit is hardly the first against OpenAI. Other lawsuits that IP Law Daily has covered include actions brought by The New York Times and two other media publications, The Intercept, The Authors Guild, and two entities in India and Germany, among others.

The case is No. 1:25-cv-00501-UNA.

Attorneys: Kristen Healey Cramer (Coplan & Aronoff LLP) for Ziff Davis, Inc.

Companies: Ziff Davis, Inc.; OpenAI, Inc.

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