Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, has filed a lawsuit against generative AI company Perplexity, accusing it of unlawfully scraping human-made content from its famous platforms to train machine-learning models.
News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA) chief executive Robert Thomson described the tech company’s actions as an abuse of intellectual property, opining that it harms journalists, writers and publishers.
“The perplexing Perplexity has willfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source,” Thomson said.
Lured away from news platforms
The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the company, alleges that Perplexity's business case relies on using copyrighted content from the publishers without permission, diverting traffic away from their platforms.
The complaint claims that Perplexity generates responses to user queries by taking human-created content from Dow Jones and other sources.
This means that users bypass the publishers' websites, and with them, the advertising that keeps them afloat.
In the words of the suit: “Perplexity’s core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on the plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against the plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive the plaintiffs of critical revenue sources.”
Licensing deal or lawsuit
While Perplexity has yet to respond to requests for comment, the lawsuit follows growing concern among news publishers over the use of their content by AI companies without copyright protection or compensation.
Some publishers have addressed the problem by opting for licensing agreements, while others, such as the New York Times, have pursued legal action against AI firms.
Earlier this year, News Corp entered a US$250 million licensing deal with OpenAI, contrasting Perplexity’s practices by describing OpenAI as “principled” in its use of intellectual property.