The New York Times sues Perplexity for producing ‘verbatim’ copies of its work

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

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

The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement successful December 2023, and aboriginal inked a woody with Amazon, bringing its contented to products similar 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 oregon evaded method contented extortion measures,” specified as the robots.txt file, which indicates the parts of a website crawlers tin access.

Perplexity attempted to creaseless things implicit by launching a programme to stock advertisement gross with publishers past year, which it aboriginal expanded to include its Comet web browser successful August.

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

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