Another Battle in the AI Content War
The tension between AI and media keeps getting louder.
Ziff Davis, digital media giant behind PCMag, CNET, IGN, and Everyday Health, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit has claims of massive copyright infringement.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI has been “intentionally and relentlessly” copying and storing data. And at the same time has been using Ziff Davis’s original content to train its language models that too without any sort of permission.
And they’re not the only ones raising their voice. This is not the first time OpenAI has been alleged of copyright infringement. A while back OpenAI Faced Legal Challenges from Indian Media Over Copyright Infringement.
What Exactly Is Ziff Davis Alleging
The lawsuit was filed in Delaware federal court, it claims that OpenAI used its AI training data to generate “exact copies” of Ziff Davis’s articles. This kept on happening despite the publisher explicitly blocked crawlers with a robots.txt file. In other words, Ziff Davis told the bots not to use their content, but it’s alleged that OpenAI did not stop.
The company also says that OpenAI stripped all forms of copyright info from its content and failed miserably to seek any kind of licensing deal. That’s really a huge fact when you consider that Ziff Davis owns more than 45 media brands and publishes nearly 2 million articles a year.
The complaint reads:
“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.”
Why This Lawsuit Matters
This isn’t just one company pushing back. OpenAI has been accused of copyright infringement multiple times already. And now, Ziff Davis joins a growing list of major publishers that are suing OpenAI, including:
- The New York Times
- The Intercept
- Dow Jones
- Raw Story
- A coalition of Canadian outlets
However, some publishers such as The Washington Post and The Financial Times, have taken a different route. They have agreed to signing of licensing agreements with OpenAI to allow the use of their content.
What Everyone’s Missing: The Bigger Risk
What everyone’s failing to see is the risk of AI-generated responses replacing original publishers in search results.
So, when someone asks ChatGPT for tech advice or product reviews, what it does is it responds with near-identical content pulled from PCMag or IGN. In this scenario, the user never visits the original site. What this means is that no ad revenue, no traffic, and potentially, no business model for the digital publishers who rely on pageviews.
This issue here is about who gets credit (and revenue) in an AI-first internet.
Can the Courts Keep Up?
The greater question from these complaints and lawsuits is does the legal system have the ability to keep pace with fast-moving AI innovation. It gives us a warning that by the time courts make a decision, the damage to media companies could be irreversible.
And that’s no where an exaggeration.
Generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude are already redefining how people access news and information. If legal protections don’t catch up soon, content creators could lose control over the very material that sustains them.
