News Corp is pursuing legal action against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of illegally copying content from its outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, to train its AI models and generate revenue at the expense of journalists and publishers.
Dow Jones & Company and NYP Holdings, both owned by News Corp, filed a lawsuit in New York, claiming Perplexity has engaged in widespread copyright infringement by using their material without permission. This follows months of similar complaints from other major publishers such as Wired, Forbes, and The New York Times, all of whom accuse Perplexity of scraping content and circumventing paywalls.
Unauthorized Content Use
News Corp alleges that Perplexity creates a “substitute product” by repackaging articles, sometimes copying them verbatim and presenting them as its own, without proper attribution or compensation. The lawsuit further claims that even when the AI’s summaries differ from the original text, the ingestion and storage of copyrighted material constitute copyright violations.
Additionally, the media conglomerate warns that inaccurate outputs, known as AI hallucinations, are harming its brand by associating its outlets with factually incorrect information.
Perplexity frames its platform as an “answer engine” similar to ChatGPT but offers features like a “Discover” tab, where AI-generated summaries of news stories appear alongside smaller links to the original sources. However, critics argue that the links to the original content are not prominent enough, and the AI-generated summaries act as knockoff versions of the original stories. Forbes and other outlets have criticized this approach, contending that Perplexity is devaluing journalism and diverting critical revenue streams from content creators.
Despite sending a legal letter in July demanding that Perplexity stop using its content, News Corp claims the startup failed to respond, leading to the lawsuit. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has sharply criticized Perplexity for its practices, stating that the company “shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source.”
Thomson contrasted Perplexity’s behavior with that of OpenAI, which has struck deals with various publishers, including News Corp, in exchange for using their content. News Corp is now asking the court to stop Perplexity from using its material and to force the startup to destroy any databases containing their works.
Perplexity Justifies Its Use of Web Content
Perplexity, which is reportedly poised to double its valuation to $8 billion, has defended its use of web content by asserting that news articles fall under fair use, a claim that News Corp disputes.
Perplexity’s spokesperson emphasized the company’s commitment to transparency, stating that its policies on content use are publicly available and arguing that no single organization holds copyright over facts. However, News Corp contends that the wholesale copying and repurposing of its content goes far beyond the bounds of fair use and poses a serious threat to the integrity of journalism.
