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Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire Sues Perplexity AI for Copyright Infringement

By  |  October 21, 2024

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which includes Dow Jones and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity AI on Monday, accusing the company of engaging in widespread copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity AI has been illegally copying a “massive amount” of its copyrighted material, according to Reuters.

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    Perplexity AI offers a search tool powered by advanced large language models (LLMs) from providers like OpenAI and Meta’s Llama. The platform allows users to receive instant answers to queries, complete with citations and sources, by summarizing and generating information from various databases. However, Dow Jones and the New York Post contend that Perplexity has unfairly profited from their content without permission or payment, as per the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York.

    “This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce,” the lawsuit claims. Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns both Dow Jones and the New York Post, is seeking an injunction to stop Perplexity from using its articles and demanding the destruction of any database containing its copyrighted work.

    Read more: Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Legal Frameworks in the Asia-Pacific Region

    The legal filing highlights Perplexity’s use of a method known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an AI technique that pulls information from various sources to generate responses for user queries. Dow Jones and the New York Post allege that their articles were incorporated into these datasets without their consent, allowing Perplexity to profit off the work of journalists and content creators while diminishing the need for users to visit the original sources.

    In a statement, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson condemned Perplexity’s practices, calling them an abuse of intellectual property that harms not just News Corp but also journalists and the broader media industry. “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, per Reuters. “Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip the links’ — apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check.”

    This lawsuit comes on the heels of similar accusations from other major media outlets. Earlier this month, The New York Times issued a “cease and desist” notice to Perplexity, demanding that it stop using the newspaper’s content for its generative AI purposes. Publications such as Forbes and Wired have also previously accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their material. In response, the startup has launched a revenue-sharing program in an effort to address some of the concerns raised by these publishers.

    Source: Reuters