Perplexity blasts media as ‘adversarial’ in response to copyright lawsuit

Perplexity blasts media as ‘adversarial’ in response to copyright lawsuit

The Verge

AI startup Perplexity, which offers an AI search engine, published a blog post today pushing back on News Corp’s lawsuit against the company.

Perplexity has recently come under significant scrutiny following accusations that it scraped content without permission, and News Corp, which is the parent company of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal-owner Dow Jones, alleged that Perplexity’s search engine “copies on a massive scale.”

Perplexity, in its response today, argues that news organizations like News Corp that have filed lawsuits against AI companies “prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

No one, including corporations, owns facts. Copyright can, however, cover how facts are expressed — in other words, the material that News Corp is suing over. (Previously, Forbes accused Perplexity of publishing “eerily similar wording” and “some entirely lifted fragments” from its stories.)

Perplexity thinks that the lawsuit “reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is — while depressingly familiar — fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating.” The company says there are “countless things we would love to do beyond what the default application of law allows,” and it points to its revenue-sharing program it has launched in partnership with publications like Time, Der Spiegel, and Fortune as something that it’s proud of. It also says the facts alleged in News Corp’s lawsuit are “misleading at best.”

When reached for comment, News Corp shared the same statement from CEO Robert Thomson that it shared on Monday:

Perplexity perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp. 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. Perplexity proudly states that users can “skip the links” — apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check.

We applaud principled companies like OpenAI, which understands that integrity and creativity are essential if we are to realise the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Perplexity is not the only AI company abusing intellectual property and it is not the only AI company that we will pursue with vigor and rigor. We have made clear that we would rather woo than sue, but, for the sake of our journalists, our writers and our company, we must challenge the content kleptocracy.

Update, October 24th: Added statement from News Corp.