Major US news publishers Dow Jones & Co and NYP Holdings have sued AI search engine startup Perplexity for scraping their content without paying for it.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of The Wall Street Journal and its sister tabloid New York Post by their parent company News Corporation, alleges two counts of copyright infringement and one of false designation of origin and dilution of trademarks. The plaintiffs accuse the AI biz of stealing the hard work of journalists to feed the data requirements of its training models. News Corp’s CEO Robert Thomson claimed this could be the first of many such lawsuits against AI developers.
"The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source. Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip the links’ – apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check," he told The Register in a statement.
"We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realize the potential of Artificial Intelligence. 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 isn’t against sharing its intellectual property to train AI systems – but it wants the money upfront. In May it inked a deal with the aforementioned OpenAI for just this purpose, with a reported price tag over $250 million. The machine learning juggernaut also has similar deals in place with Reddit and Stack Overflow . Everyone wants better web search – is Perplexity’s AI the answer?
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According to court documents [PDF] filed in the Southern District of New York […]
Major publishers sue Perplexity AI for scraping without paying
