News Corp’s Dow Jones and the NY Post have sued growing AI startup Perplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy.”
In a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday, the media organization claimed that Perplexity engages in copyright violations on a “grand scale,” simultaneously duplicating and misrepresenting original content created by others:
Its AI “answer engine” copies on a massive scale, among other things, copyrighted news content, analysis, and opinion as inputs into its internal database. It then uses that copyrighted content to generate responses to users’ queries that are intended to and do act as a substitute for news and other information websites. Perplexity loudly touts that its answers to user queries are so reliable that its users can “Skip the Links” to the original publishers and instead rely wholly on Perplexity for their news and analysis needs. What Perplexity does not tout is that its core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive Plaintiffs of critical revenue sources.
They are far from the first to make this claim. Many news sites have expressed concerns that Perplexity closely replicates their content, with the occasionally egregious example like the Forbes piece called out this summer. Just last week the New York Times sent a cease and desist to Perplexity.
Perplexity, for its part, tends to characterize its web scrapers as collecting data not for inclusion in AI training, but simply as an index for its models to refer to when attempting to answer a user’s question. We’ve asked the company for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
The fast-moving industry has skirted copyright law in general, but the unprecedented nature of large-scale AI agents and scrapers means that existing rules may not apply as one might intuitively expect. A number of lawsuits are in process alleging various forms of copyright infringement, but so far none has reached a conclusion on the matter. Each no doubt hopes it is filing the landmark lawsuit that breaks the back of big AI.
“We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realise the potential of Artificial Intelligence,” wrote News Corp CEO Robert Thomson issued a statement. (News Corp signed a lucrative multi-year content deal with OpenAI earlier this year.)
“Perplexity is not the only AI company abusing intellectual property and it is not the only AI company that we will pursue with vigor and rigor. We have made clear that we would rather woo than sue, but, for the sake of our journalists, our writers and our company, we must challenge the content kleptocracy.
News Corp seeks $150,000 per infringement, plus Perplexity’s profits on them, among other remedies — that would lead to astronomical damages depending on how the evidence is interpreted.