According to the lawsuit filed by the Wall Street Journal's parent company Dow Jones and the NY Post in the Southern District of New York on October 21, "the lawsuit is brought by the news publishers seeking damages from Perplexity for its scheme to benefit from and compete for readers with the valuable content these publishers create."

The lawsuit is the latest move in a long-running battle between news publishers and tech companies over how the latter illegally use copyrighted content to build and power their AI systems.

Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups trying to disrupt the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It aggregates information from websites and news sites, then provides summaries directly in Perplexity's own engine.

News organizations allege Perplexity's AI-generated "answering machine" collected copyrighted news, analysis and opinion into an internal database used to generate responses to user questions.

In the lawsuit, the publishers argue that their journalists must investigate and write hard to produce high-quality, easy-to-understand publications that meet the high demand for news. These publications rely on advertising and subscription sales to cover their journalism costs, but are being “hijacked” by tech companies like Perplexity and OpenAI.

The lawsuit accuses Perplexity of copying “large quantities” of publishers’ work into its database, using an AI technique called retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) to provide answers to user queries.

News organizations claim Perplexity sometimes responds by copying content verbatim. These actions constitute illegal copyright infringement.

Earlier in July, Dow Jones and the New York Post sent a letter to Perplexity notifying it of legal issues arising from the company's unauthorized use of copyrighted works, and offered to discuss a legal licensing agreement.

Ngoc Anh (according to Reuters)