The New York Times Sues Perplexity For Producing ‘verbatim’ Copies Of Its Work

The New York Times has escalated its ineligible conflict against nan AI startup Perplexity, arsenic it’s now suing nan AI “answer engine” for allegedly producing and profiting from responses that are “verbatim aliases substantially akin copies” of nan publication’s work.

The lawsuit, filed successful a New York national tribunal connected Friday, claims Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes” contented from nan NYT. It comes aft nan outlet’s repeated demands for Perplexity to extremity utilizing contented from its website, arsenic nan NYT sent cease-and-desist notices to nan AI startup past year and astir precocious successful July, according to nan lawsuit.  The Chicago Tribune besides revenge a copyright lawsuit against Perplexity connected Thursday.

The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement successful December 2023, and later inked a woody pinch Amazon, bringing its contented to products for illustration Alexa.

Perplexity became the subject of several lawsuits after reporting from Forbes and Wired revealed that the startup had been skirting websites’ paywalls to supply AI-generated summaries — and successful some cases, copies — of their work. The NYT makes akin accusations successful its lawsuit, stating that Perplexity’s crawlers “have intentionally ignored aliases evaded method contented protection measures,” specified as nan robots.txt file, which indicates nan parts of a website crawlers tin access.

“By copying The Times’s copyrighted contented and creating substitutive output derived from its works, obviating nan request for users to sojourn The Times’s website aliases acquisition its newspaper, Perplexity is misappropriating important subscription, advertising, licensing, and connection gross opportunities that beryllium rightfully and exclusively to The Times,” nan suit states. 

The NYT is seeking damages and is besides asking nan tribunal to permanently artifact nan AI startup from engaging successful its allegedly unlawful behavior. Perplexity didn’t instantly respond to a petition for comment.