Overview

• Ziff Davis, owner of major outlets like IGN, CNET, and Mashable, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Delaware federal court on April 24, 2025.
• The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of intentionally using copyrighted content from Ziff Davis publications to train its AI models without permission, violating intellectual property laws.
• Ziff Davis claims OpenAI ignored its robots.txt directives and removed copyright information from its content during data scraping processes.
• The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and an injunction to prevent OpenAI from using its content in future AI training.
• OpenAI defends its practices, asserting that its models are trained on publicly available data under fair use principles and contribute to innovation and societal benefit.