## Perplexity’s AI Search Engine Faces Copyright Lawsuit from News Corp
Perplexity AI, the ambitious startup aiming to replace Google as the dominant search engine, is facing a significant legal hurdle. News Corp, the media conglomerate behind publications like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing it of rampant copyright infringement.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday, alleges that Perplexity has been lifting news, opinions, and analyses directly from News Corp’s publications without proper attribution or compensation. This isn’t the first time Perplexity has been under fire for its business practices, and it’s likely not the last.
A New Kind of Search, a Controversial Model
Perplexity doesn’t rely on a proprietary AI like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google. Instead, it uses open-source and commercially available models to process information scraped from the public web. Its value proposition lies in acting as a middleman, training its AI on copyrighted content and then regurgitating it (often verbatim, according to the lawsuit) to its paying customers without acknowledging or compensating the original content creators.
This model, while potentially appealing for users seeking concise answers, has raised serious concerns among publishers. Perplexity’s summaries effectively allow users to skip the links provided by Google Search, directly accessing high-quality information through its chatbot. This directly challenges the symbiotic relationship between Google Search and news sites, where Google generates revenue through ads on its search results while driving traffic to the publishers, who in turn earn revenue through ads on their websites.
A Pattern of Infringement
This isn’t the first instance of Perplexity facing criticism for its content sourcing practices. In June, Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane accused Perplexity of “willful infringement” after the chatbot cited aggregated stories covering original Forbes content, giving the impression of original reporting. Lane also pointed out that Perplexity’s AI generated a podcast and YouTube video about the Forbes story, which outranked all Forbes content on the topic in Google search.
Furthermore, Forbes alleges that Perplexity utilized an exclusive and paywalled story about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s efforts to build military drones, lifting entire passages verbatim and subsequently garnering over 30,000 views.
In July, Conde Nast sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, accusing it of copying content from The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired. Wired published a damning report detailing how Perplexity’s web crawler visited Conde Nast properties at least 822 times in just three months, a figure likely undercounting the actual number of visits.
The New York Times followed suit in October with its own cease-and-desist letter, claiming that Perplexity’s scraping and summarizing practices violate copyright law.
A Looming Threat for Traditional Media?
News Corp’s lawsuit further alleges that Perplexity routinely misrepresents facts, sometimes citing incorrect sources and even fabricating stories attributed to News Corp publications. While Perplexity has been criticized for its practices, the company remains defiant. CEO Aravind Srinivas stated on Twitter that “we agree with the feedback you’ve shared that it should be a lot easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently,” but the company has yet to implement significant changes.
Despite the growing criticisms and legal battles, Perplexity is reportedly seeking a $9 billion valuation in a new funding round. This suggests that, despite the legal challenges, the company remains confident in its future, even as traditional media outlets grapple with the existential threat posed by AI-powered search engines.
The legal battle between Perplexity and News Corp will likely set a precedent for how copyright law applies to AI-powered search engines and raise crucial questions about the future of traditional media in an increasingly AI-driven world. The outcome of this case could shape the landscape of online information and content consumption for years to come.