In a major lawsuit, Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post, both under News Corp, are suing Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity for alleged copyright and trademark infringement. Filed in October 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit claims Perplexity illegally copies and displays their copyrighted content to fuel its AI-based search engine. Unlike traditional search engines, directing users to external sites, Perplexity provides direct answers, bypassing original publisher websites.
Perplexity promotes itself as a real-time, generative AI search platform linking to sources for verification. Unlike other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude by Anthropic, Perplexity includes source links to verify information. However, the lawsuit contends Perplexity systematically copies proprietary content, including from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, without authorization, diverting massive traffic and ad revenue from these media companies. They call this a “free-rider problem,” taking advantage of content without compensation.
Actually, a separate investigation in June reportedly found Perplexity was not compliant with robots.txt standards, allowing sites to block web crawlers from crawling content, despite the claims of Perplexity otherwise. Perplexity also publicly lists the IP address ranges and user-agent strings of its web crawlers, but they use undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user-agent strings while ignoring robots.txt. In some cases, Perplexity may not summarize the actual news articles, but instead reconstruct the news content based on URLs and traces left in search engines, such as excerpts and metadata, purportedly based on direct access to the relevant text.
Key Allegations
The lawsuit claims Perplexity scrapes and reproduces articles to deliver answers without permission, raising concerns over AI models using copyrighted materials without compensating the original creators. The lawsuit labels the model of Perplexity as free-riding, as it benefits financially without supporting the original publishers. The CEO of News Corp, Robert Thomson, has criticized the practices of Perplexity, calling them part of a “content kleptocracy.” Thomson contrasts Perplexity with companies like OpenAI, licensing agreements with News Corp, arguing the failure of Perplexity to secure licenses led to this lawsuit.
Broader Implications
Beyond copyright violations, the lawsuit accuses Perplexity of inaccurately attributing information to sources like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, harming reputations. News Corp is seeking a court order to stop Perplexity from using their content without consent and to delete any databases containing their materials.
With high-profile backers such as NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Perplexity has yet to respond but is expected to face substantial legal and financial challenges. This case is significant as it may set new legal standards for content licensing in AI, potentially requiring compensation to content creators. The outcome could impact AI use of copyrighted material across sectors like news, entertainment, and research, and influence the balance between AI innovation and fair content use.
This case is one of many recent legal actions by media companies against AI firms, intensifying the debate on AI, copyright, and fair use.