The New York Times filed suit Friday against AI search startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, its second lawsuit against an AI company. The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including theChicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times’s suit claims that “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute” for the outlet, “without permission or remuneration.”
The lawsuit – filed even as several publishers,including The Times, negotiate deals with AI firms – is part of the same, ongoing years-long strategy. Recognizing the AI tide cannot be stopped, publishers use lawsuits as leverage in negotiations in the hopes of forcing AI companies to formally license content in ways that compensate creators and maintain the economic viability of original journalism.
Perplexity tried to address compensation demands by launching aPublishers’ Program last year,which offers participating outlets like Gannett, TIME, Fortune and the Los Angeles Times a share of ad revenue. In August,Perplexity also launched Comet Plus, allocating 80% of its $5 monthly fee to participating publishers, and recently struck amulti-year licensing deal with Getty Images.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products,” Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. “We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work.”
Similar to the Tribune’s suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity’s method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant.
“Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users,” the suit reads.“Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.”
Or, as James put it in his statement, “RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers.”
The Times also claims Perplexity’s search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand.
The lawsuit comes just over a year afterThe Times sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexitydemanding it stop using its content for summaries and other output. The outlet claims it has contacted Perplexity several times over the past 18 months to stop using its content unless an agreement could be negotiated.
This isn’t the first fight The Times has picked with an AI firm. The Tims is alsosuing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, claiming the two trained their AI systems with millions of the outlet’s articles without offering compensation. OpenAI has argued that its use of publicly available data for AI training constitutes “fair use,” and hasshot its own accusationsat the Times, claiming the outlet manipulated ChatGPT to find evidence.
That case is still ongoing, but a similar lawsuit directed against OpenAI competitor Anthropic could set a precedent in regards to fair use for training AI systems going forward. In that suit, in which authors and publishers sued the AI firm for using pirated books to train its models, the court ruled that while lawfully acquired books might be a safe fair use application, pirated ones infringe on copyrights.Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement.
In its suit, The Times is asking the courts to make Perplexity pay for the harm allegedly caused and ban the startup from continuing to use its content.
The Times is clearly not above working with AI firms that compensate for its reporters’ work. The outlet earlier this yearstruck a multiyear deal with Amazonto license its content to train the tech giant’s AI models. Several other publishers and media companies have signed licensing deals with AI firms to use their content for training and to feature in chatbot responses.OpenAI has inked dealswith Associated Press, Axel Springer, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and more.
Source: Techcrunch
