Ziff Davis, the media company that owns more than a few websites, from IGN, Eurogamer to RPS and Mashable are suing OpenAI, accusing the AI company of “infringing on the publishers copyrights and diluting its trademarks” per a new report from the New York Times.
The lawsuit was filed in Delaware, the same state in which OpenAI is registered, and it doesn’t hold back. Per the New York Times, Ziff Davis says that OpenAI has “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” and that “OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI told the New York Times that the models used for things like ChatGPT were ‘grounded in fair use’. Per the report, which cites anonymous sources, Ziff Davis are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars – at least.
The rise of AI has been a hot debate among games media for a while now. Many sites primary income, views and readership comes in the form of guides for video games. If an AI has scraped those guides, and users stop visiting the actual source website for the information directly, what happens to those sites?
It’s worth noting that the New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft, on much the same grounds.
Where do you stand? Is it fair use or way out of line? Have you say on the XboxEra Forums or our lively Community Discord!
