Background
Ziff Davis moved for leave to file a proposed second amended complaint adding allegations about OpenAI’s web scraping tool ‘GPTBot’ and the role of robots.txt files and industry practice, aimed at pleading a DMCA section 1201(a) access-control theory.
AI Interaction
The dispute, as framed in the briefing and proposed amendments, centres on web crawling and scraping for model training. The plaintiffs’ position describes robots.txt as implementing Robots Exclusion Protocol ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’ directives, and alleges OpenAI’s ‘GPTBot’ crawls content that ‘may be used in training’ foundation models, with OpenAI publishing opt-out ‘Blocking Instructions’ via robots.txt.