Perplexity Lawsuit by the NYT claims copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of using news content without permission

The Perplexity lawsuit highlights the ongoing legal battle as the New York Times serves the AI-based startup with a cease-and-desist letter over copyright infringement. Read about sellers’ legal fight and its consequences.

Perplexity, an AI startup, was recently served with a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Times (NYT), which asked the company to cease using its content for generative AI. According to the cease-and-desist notice sent on October 2, Perplexity infringes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using the newspaper’s content.

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Ever since the release of general AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, there has been a concern from publishers regarding AI models leveraging the contents provided by those publishers without consent. Perplexity is one of the latest AI firms to be accused of using news articles to write summaries, thus upsetting media companies.

Perplexity’s Response:

Besides, Perplexity denies scraping data to develop AI models and only crawls web pages to offer facts when users ask questions. Perplexity has promised publishers such crawling is no longer a thing but the NYT can confirm that its materials creep into Perplexity.

A Broader AI Battle:

The conflicts between the NYT and Perplexity are not unique as we see similar tensions between media companies and AI firms. The NYT has also sued OpenAI, for allegedly using more than millions of its articles for training AI systems & models. Some say that the company erected companies that provide ‘AI as a service’ platforms have been flouting standards intended to white-list data scraping.

To appease publishers that were upset with Perplexity for allegedly stealing content from mostly Forbes and Wired, the firm initiated a revenue-sharing program. Nevertheless, there are current legal cases, which prove the perpetual conflict between AI usage and content producers.

Image Credit: Kena Betancur/VIEWpress