FT owner sues Perplexity AI for copyright infringement
The owner of the Financial Times has accused Perplexity AI, a US technology company, of “free-riding” on journalists’ articles in a practice that risks “ultimately threatening the core of democracy”.
Nikkei, the Japanese company that owns the FT, has filed a lawsuit alongside The Asahi Shimbun, a daily Japanese title, accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement.
The two media companies allege that Perplexity used their articles without permission and has repeatedly displayed content from these articles on users’ devices since at least June 2024. They claim that unauthorised content used by Perplexity includes articles behind Nikkei’s paywall.
In a joint statement, the companies said: “This course of Perplexity’s actions amounts to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation.
“If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy.”
The publishers are seeking an injunction to ensure Perplexity stops reproducing their content. They are also seeking damages of 2.2 billion yen (£11.1 million) each. Perplexity has been contacted for comment.
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine start-up based in San Francisco and founded in 2022. It has 30 million users and last month secured an $18 billion valuation in a funding round.
News organisations are becoming increasingly concerned about the use of AI driving widespread copyright infringement.
Publishers fear that AIgenerated content such as Google’s AI overviews will reduce valuable web traffic to their sites.
The BBC has threatened legal action against Perplexity, accusing the company of training its “default AI model” using BBC content. Perplexity called the BBC’s claims “manipulative and opportunistic”, adding that the broadcaster had “a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law”.
Dow Jones and the New York Post are also suing Perplexity over the alleged misuse of their articles to train its AI systems. The owner of Dow Jones and the New York Post is News Corporation, which also owns The Times and The Sunday Times.
Dow Jones and NYP Holdings said in their lawsuit, filed last year, that Perplexity’s AI “answer engine” copies their content without permission or compensation to generate responses to user prompts. They accused Perplexity of “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders”.
This month, Perplexity failed to convince a New York federal court to dismiss or transfer the lawsuit.
Perplexity runs a default language model and provides subscribers with access to advanced models, including ChatGPT, designed for more complex tasks such as creative writing.
The AI start-up has a revenue-sharing programme to address concerns from publishers, which involves sharing advertising revenue from interactions when a publisher’s content is referenced.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that it was also launching a new programme for publishers.
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive, said: “AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid. So we think this is actually the right solution.”
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