Judge Sidney Stein, who oversees the MDL Litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, denied Ziff Davis’s (owner of Mashable and other web media) motion to add a DMCA anti-circumvention claim.
Similar to Judge Stein’s earlier grant of OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, Judge Stein ruled that the alleged scraping of content without recognizing a websites robot.txt file does not allege a violation of the DMCA: robots.txt does not effectively control access to copyrighted content to qualify as a technological protection measure under the definition of the DMCA.
