• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 25, 2025

OpenAI has gone through another roller coaster week with the publishing industry.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post announced it had formed a strategic partnership with OpenAI to make its news content accessible in ChatGPT.  

Two days later, Ziff Davis filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court, accusing OpenAI of  “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” and using them to train its AI models.

Ziff Davis publishes more than 45 titles, including CNET, Mashable and PCMag, and has many ancillary businesses. If it ever considered signing a deal with OpenAI, it isn’t saying so.  

On the contrary, Ziff Davis argues that “OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law,” according to the New York Times, which broke the story. 

The Times itself is suing OpenAI, as are eight Alden Global Capital newspapers, very serious players with great legal firepower. Some of these cases were recently consolidated and are going through a tedious discovery process. Five Canadian publishers and the Center for Investigative Reporting have also filed suit.

An OpenAI spokesperson says that its AI models "empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” Reuters reports. 

Indeed, OpenAI has formed arrangements with more than 20 news publishers, including Guardian Media Group, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, The Atlantic,Vox Media, News Corp and Axel Springer. These agreements are bringing much-needed cash into the coffers of publishers. 

But the lawsuits aren’t going away. And publishers have to consider the swirling coverage of OpenAI as a corporate entity. Whether they sign or fight, their main duty to themselves is to protect their intellectual property.