Oct 25, 2024 15:00:00

Perplexity responds to copyright lawsuit from News Corp, claims 'ignoring conversation' was a mistake and that they responded the same day but were ignored

On October 22, 2024

, News Corp , the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, filed a copyright lawsuit against Perplexity , an AI search service. On the other hand, Perplexity published a rebuttal on its blog on October 24, 2024, appealing the injustice of the lawsuit.

About the Dow Jones lawsuit
https://www.perplexity.ai/ja/hub/blog/about-the-dow-jones-lawsuit

Perplexity, an AI-based search service, is characterized by generating answers to search terms based on information from news sources and blog articles on the Internet. On the other hand, because Perplexity has the function of 'generating answers based on content on the Internet,' it has frequently faced

copyright issues and has been taking measures such as launching an advertising revenue sharing program to resolve legal issues. However, Perplexity has been facing increasing criticism, with the major daily newspaper The New York Times issuing a notice to cease using content on Perplexity in October 2024.

The New York Times demands that AI startup Perplexity halt access to and use of its content - GIGAZINE

In addition, News Corp, the parent company of media such as the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and the New York Post, sued Perplexity for copyright infringement on October 21, 2024. In the complaint, News Corp pursues Perplexity's unauthorized use of content and the display of misinformation generated by AI hallucinations.

The Wall Street Journal's parent company sues AI search service Perplexity for copyright infringement, Perplexity ignores proposed license agreement - GIGAZINE

In response, Perplexity released a statement saying it was 'surprised and disappointed.' In a blog post, Perplexity criticized, 'There are dozens of lawsuits against Perplexity by media companies, all with a common theme: 'This technology shouldn't exist.' The media companies suing Perplexity seem to want a world in which public facts are proprietary to the companies, and you can't do anything about them unless you pay for it.'

Perplexity claims that 'we believe that tools like Perplexity can provide a transformative way for people to learn facts about the world. Perplexity is essential to the healthy functioning of a cultural ecosystem where people can efficiently and effectively acquire and engage with knowledge produced by others.'

In addition, in response to News Corp's lawsuit, Perplexity said, 'The facts alleged in the complaint are misleading. News Corp's example of 'sometimes outputting the entire article as a response' misrepresents the source of the material. Even the specifically cited examples provide insufficient explanations of what happened.' In addition, Perplexity said to the media companies suing it, 'Many of the companies suing us make poor claims based on results obtained by undesirable actions on AI tools. And when pressed on how they got these results, they tend to quickly withdraw the examples and declare that they will not actually use them in court. This will be the case in this lawsuit against News Corp,' claiming that the examples given by News Corp were deliberately drawn out.

In addition, News Corp claims that it sent a letter to Perplexity in July 2024 proposing to enter into a formal license agreement, but did not receive a response from Perplexity. In response, Perplexity said, 'This claim is false. We responded to News Corp on the same day we received the letter. However, News Corp did not respond to the dialogue and instead filed a lawsuit.' In response, Perplexity made the opposite claim.

At the end of its rebuttal, Perplexity declared, 'We remain committed to working with media companies to provide innovative tools to our customers. AI-powered search engines are not going away.'