News Corp, the parent company of media outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing the AI search engine Perplexity for infringing copyrighted content. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, News Corp alleges Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions “on a massive scale.”
Perplexity is an AI startup that trains its AI search models using content from around the web, allowing it to respond to user queries with a summary of its sources. As outlined in the lawsuit, Perplexity bills itself as a platform that lets users “skip the links” to online articles, which News Corp alleges drives “customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders.”
In addition to accusing Perplexity of reproducing some content “verbatim,” News Corp also claims Perplexity can falsely attribute facts and analysis to the company’s outlets, “sometimes citing an incorrect source, and other times simply inventing and attributing to Plaintiffs fabricated news stories.” The lawsuit claims News Corp sent a letter to Perplexity about its “unauthorized” use of its content in July, but Perplexity “did not bother to respond.”
News Corp is asking the court to force Perpelxity to stop using its content without permission and to destroy any database containing its works. The Verge reached out to Perplexity with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.
“Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp,” Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, said in a statement. “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.”
