The New York Times Sues Perplexity
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 the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week.
The Times’ suit claims that “Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute” for the outlet, “without permission or remuneration.”
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Perplexity tried to address compensation demands by launching a Publishers’ 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 a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images.
Perplexity became the subject of several lawsuits after reporting from Forbes and Wired revealed that the startup had been skirting websites’ paywalls to provide AI-generated summaries — and in some cases, copies — of their work. The NYT makes similar accusations in its lawsuit, stating that Perplexity’s crawlers “have intentionally ignored or evaded technical content protection measures,” such as the robots.txt file, which indicates the parts of a website crawlers can access.
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The NYT is seeking damages and is also asking the court to permanently block the AI startup from engaging in its allegedly unlawful behavior.
Perplexity’s spokesperson didn’t seem to deny the allegations.
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