Publisher of IGN, Eurogamer, PCMag and Digital Foundry Sues OpenAI

Digital publisher Ziff Davis, which owns IGN, Eurogamer, Digital Foundry, GamesIndustry.biz and PCMag, filed a complaint in federal court against OpenAI, on April 24, 2025, according to reports from The New York Times.

In a 62-page complaint that was filed in Delaware, the state of OpenAI’s incorporation, Ziff Davis says that the tech company behind ChatGPT has “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” and by doing so, infringed on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks.

Ziff Davis’s claims allege that OpenAI utilized content from publisher’s outlets to train its AI models and generate responses in its chatbot ChatGPT. In the complaint digital publisher stated that “OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law.”

According to the The New York Times’ sources Ziff Davis is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in the lawsuit.

A spokesman for OpenAI said in a statement that its models were “grounded in fair use,” referring to the legal standard for use of copyrighted material.

Media companies have generally reacted in two ways to the rise of AI tech, either by negotiating licensing agreements with firms like OpenAI, as seen with News Corporation, publisher of The Wall Street Journal or by filing lawsuits to claim damages and assert their intellectual property rights.

It is worth noting that on Dec. 4, 2024, Future Publishing, which owns Edge, PC Gamer, GamesRadar, Tom’s Guide and Retro Gamer, announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to bring content from over 200 of its media brands to ChatGPT.