MANAHATTAN, NEW YORK – A federal judge on Monday allowed three copyright claims by digital publisher Ziff Davis against ChatGPT developer OpenAI to move forward, while dismissing several other claims.
Ziff Davis, which owns major digital media brands including Mashable, PCMag, IGN, and Lifehacker, alleges that OpenAI scraped its online content without permission to train its AI chatbot models. U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein ruled that three of the publisher’s copyright infringement claims, including allegations that OpenAI distributed copyrighted works with removed copyright management information in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, could proceed. Stein wrote that Ziff Davis plausibly alleged end-user infringement and that OpenAI had actual or constructive knowledge of third-party infringement.
However, the judge dismissed claims related to common law unjust enrichment and circumvention of technological measures concerning “robots.txt” files, which block web crawlers from accessing certain content. Stein noted that ignoring robots.txt instructions does not legally constitute circumvention under the DMCA. The ruling also partially allowed and partially denied dismissal of trademark dilution claims, finding that only Mashable is famous enough to support such a claim, while other Ziff Davis properties, including Lifehacker, CNET, ZDNET, PCMag, BabyCenter, and IGN, are not.
Stein also granted OpenAI’s motion to stay portions of the case involving newer ChatGPT models—including o1, o1-mini, o1-pro, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, o3, o3-mini, o4-mini, and GPT-5—arguing that expanding discovery to these models would be burdensome and delay resolution of the core copyright issues in the ongoing multidistrict litigation.
During oral arguments, attorneys for Ziff Davis warned that a stay could force the company to litigate twice, while OpenAI’s legal team argued that including the additional models would significantly slow discovery in the multidistrict case. Stein is overseeing the consolidated copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, formally titled In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation.