Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against AI startup Perplexity AI, accusing it of engaging in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their copyrighted work. This reflects a broader trend of clashes between the media and the AI companies.
This comes only a week after The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over content use.
The plaintiffs argue that Perplexity has scrapped their original content to build its database without proper authorisation, reports Reuters. They describe this as a “brazen scheme” designed to compete for readership by leveraging their valuable journalism without paying for it.
Perplexity AI competes with Google Search by gathering information from authoritative sources, summarising it, and providing direct answers to users. While the company claims to provide citations, its marketing emphasises a user experience that allows individuals to “skip the links” and obtain answers instantly, a practice that publishers claim discourages users from clicking on the link.
The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity ingested vast quantities of copyrighted content from The Wall Street Journal, one of the several news publications under Dow Jones and the New York Post, into a database that powers AI models. According to the complaint, these models can reproduce sections of copyrighted articles verbatim, potentially bypassing publishers’ legal rights to control how their content is accessed and used.
This lawsuit represents the latest in a growing wave of litigation aimed at AI companies accused of copyright infringement. Media companies have become increasingly wary of AI’s impact on their businesses, particularly as AI-generated summaries can diminish the need for readers to access original articles.
While publishers rely on advertising and subscriptions to fund their journalism, the suit argues that AI-driven platforms like Perplexity erode the value of these business models by offering readers the same information without requiring engagement with the original content.
Dow Jones and the New York Post emphasise that their journalism is produced under tight deadlines and often in unpredictable circumstances, making it costly to create high-quality news. They claim that Perplexity undermines this hard work by siphoning off value without compensating publishers.
Perhaps the best thing publishers and AI companies have come up with is data-sharing agreements with each other. OpenAI has taken the lead in it and has made deals with publishers like the Financial Times, News Corp, Hearst, Conde Nast, The Atlantic, and Vox Media.
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