• by Ray Schultz , May 1, 2025

The lawsuit filed by Ziff Davis against OpenAI is bound to confuse judges and juries with its technical jargon. But the central allegation is clear: that OpenAI “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.”

That’s not all: “In the process, OpenAI deliberately circumvented and continues to deliberately circumvent technical copy protection measures,” the complaint continues.  “It also intentionally removes copyright management information.”

OpenAI has not yet filed an answer to the complaint, although an OpenAI spokesperson says that its AI models "empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” Reuters reports. 

Ziff Davis claims that it requested a meeting to discuss a licensing arrangement, but that “OpenAI rebuffed the invitation to meet.”

This is surprising, given that OpenAI  just signed such an agreement with the Washington Post, and has arrangements with many other publishers,  including Guardian Media Group, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, News Corp and Axel Springer. 

The complaint also charges that OpenAI “has and continues to knowingly:

Violate and circumvent Ziff Davis’s explicit written demands and technological controls; 

Strip out key copyright management information (“CMI”) from Ziff Davis Works; 

Use copied Ziff Davis Works to develop LLMs (large language models); 

Use copied Ziff Davis Works to operate LLMs and LLM-based products and services, which it provides to third parties; 

Reproduce, distribute, display, perform, and make available for access, Ziff Davis Works verbatim and in close paraphrase and derivative form (but with CMI removed)

Falsely attribute output to Ziff Davis that is not Ziff Davis content, and falsely attribute Ziff Davis content to other parties.

Discovery should be a tedious process.

Ziff Davis is asking the court to enjoin OpenAI from continuing any of these alleged activities, and demands damages and court costs. 

The case is on file with the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.