Parent company of PCMag and IGN sues OpenAI
The media company Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The lawsuit is one of a number of ongoing proceedings against the AI company.
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The wave of lawsuits from media companies against OpenAI shows no sign of abating. The publishing house Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI, accusing the company of creating exact copies of the publisher's content. This was reported by the New York Times with reference to court documents.
OpenAI uses the data for training its AI models and in responses to user queries. In addition, the ″robots.txt″ file on the publisher's websites, which is intended to prohibit web crawlers from capturing content, is being ignored. Ziff Davis is seeking a penalty payment of hundreds of millions of US dollars and hopes that other affected authors and companies will join the lawsuit.
The US media company Ziff Davis publishes more than 45 websites and news outlets in areas such as technology and gaming, including the gaming sites IGN and Eurogamer as well as the tech magazines PCMag and CNet.
OpenAI insists on fair use
OpenAI emphasized in a statement that the company only trains its models with publicly available texts and that the use falls under the ″Fair Use″ rule. This rule allows the use of copyrighted content for the general public and research purposes. OpenAI is convinced that the development of AI models falls within the scope of this definition. Whether this view will stand up in court is questionable.
Ziff Davis' lawsuit is one of several existing lawsuits filed by media companies against OpenAI. In New York, for example, the New York Times is involved in a lawsuit that has been joined by numerous companies and authors, including thriller author John Grisham and ″Game of Thrones″ author George R.R. Martin. In Canada and India, media companies are also taking OpenAI to court.
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What all the lawsuits have in common is that they accuse OpenAI of unauthorized use of their content in the training of AI models. Other media companies, on the other hand, decided to license their texts to OpenAI. Axel-Springer-Verlag, for example, signed a contract worth millions of euros that gives OpenAI access to texts from magazines such as BILD, Welt and Politico.
(acha)
