On October 21, Dow Jones, a subsidiary of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Post filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, saying It made “massive illegal copies” of their copyrighted works.
The rapidly growing field of generative artificial intelligence has given rise to many related intellectual property issues. The British "Guardian" reported in a report that the lawsuit was a fierce confrontation between content publishers and technology companies over copyright issues. According to the lawsuit filed by Dow Jones and the New York Post in the Southern District Court of New York, Perplexity used a "brazen scheme" to exploit valuable content produced by publishers for free as it competed for the "reader" market. and unauthorized content, and therefore requires compensation.
Perplexity AI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
In June this year, Perplexity was also accused of plagiarism by Forbes and the technology media Wired, claiming that their reporting content was found in Perplexity's Pages tool. Perplexity then began seeking cooperation with news media and announced a new publisher revenue sharing plan on July 30. The plan states that in the coming months, Perplexity will share a percentage of ad revenue with publishers when their content is cited in AI-generated answers. Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com media and content platform become the first companies to join the revenue sharing program.
As part of the program, publishers will also receive access to the Perplexity API, which can be used to create customized Answer Engine and Enterprise Pro accounts, in addition to being made available to all employees of publishers participating in the program. One-year Enterprise Pro offering with enhanced data privacy and security features.
Relevant reports show that Perplexity AI, which was established two years ago, was co-founded by former OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, Meta research scientist, Perplexity Chief Technology Officer Denis Yarats, and two others. Perplexity provides users with an AI chatbot that summarizes search results, lists citation sources for answers, and helps users refine their queries for the best answer. Perplexity uses several large language models (LLMs) to generate summaries, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s open source model Llama. With its outstanding performance in the search field, outsiders believe that the company may impact the search engine market dominated by Google.
Several media outlets in the United States have previously sued generative artificial intelligence companies for copyright infringement. On December 27, 2023, the "New York Times" announced that it had filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York, accusing Microsoft and OpenAI of copyright infringement, abusing the media's intellectual property rights, and "copying and using millions" of articles. The large language models used to train the two companies are now directly competing for the paper’s content.
Subsequently, three US digital news media, The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI on February 28 this year. They believe that OpenAI violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that journalists’ jobs are being threatened, while OpenAI is profiting from journalists’ hard work.
OpenAI did not contest the use of The New York Times work without consent, nor did it dispute the copyright infringement claims made by The New York Times, but argued that any such infringement was justified under the fair use doctrine. At the same time, OpenAI has signed cooperation agreements with a number of media companies to provide funding to obtain the content of these media.
The successive lawsuits filed by news media companies against OpenAI reflect the current concerns in the news industry about artificial intelligence technology. This technology will not only infringe the copyright of content creation, but also reduce the media’s advertising revenue and damage the quality of online news. The intricate relationship between artificial intelligence innovation and copyright protection has become an issue worthy of attention by legislators.