The New York Times recently sued Perplexity, raising the stakes in the fight between old media and new tech. The Times’ lawsuit calls attention to this illegal behavior on Perplexity’s part for scraping and displaying The Times’ content without a license. This new claim ramps up the legal pressure on the tech giant, accusing the company.
This expensive legal battle is a sign of a much bigger trend. Media companies are already struggling to protect their IP from the likes of Google and Facebook. The lawsuit follows a cease and desist letter sent by The New York Times to Perplexity last year, indicating an ongoing dispute over content usage.
In August, Perplexity released Comet Plus. In many ways, this new product further entrenches this behavior by giving their users completely free access to all the content each month. The company asserts that 80% of this $5 fee is allocated to participating publishers, which it claims reflects its commitment to support content creators. As pointed out by the New York Times, this doesn’t absolve Perplexity of the responsibility of licensing their content. This model does not free them from that requirement.
With RAG powering its underlying technology, Perplexity has the capability to crawl the entire internet. It makes it possible to retrieve information that has been obscured behind paywalls. The New York Times expresses concern that this mechanism allows Perplexity to access and distribute its content without proper compensation.
“RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers.” – Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times.
The New York Times had already pursued similar legal action against other AI-related tech giants, including OpenAI and Microsoft. The organization claims that these companies trained these AI systems using millions of The Times’ articles without compensation. Yet they accomplished it all without offering a single dollar in compensation, showcasing the need’s immediacy.
In a related move, just last week The New York Times agreed to a multi-year licensing deal with Amazon. Under this agreement, the tech company can use this media for training its AI models. This move is indicative of the publication’s strategy to monetize its intellectual property while simultaneously protecting it from unauthorized use.
Perplexity has made proactive attempts to stay on the right side of the law. They’ve worked out agreements with a few hundred others, including Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster. LOOKING AHEAD Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, said they were confident in their approach.
“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI,” – Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications.
Dwyer emphasized the historical context of these lawsuits. These were good moves, he said, but in the past they tended to not result in true transformational change.
“Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph,” – Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications.
The Times is steeped in the legal strategy underlying its lawsuit, which includes a number of novel claims. They claim that Perplexity’s outputs often regurgitate original works word-for-word or nearly so. This short, technical act raises large questions about what constitutes copyright infringement and fair use in an increasingly digital world.
“Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times’s copyrighted works.” – The suit
As the legal battle between The New York Times and Perplexity continues, this is becoming a critical case. It illustrates the ever-raging war between entrenched media and the platforms. Digital platforms are radically transforming the ways in which we produce and circulate information. The results of these courtroom clashes have the potential to impact both fields for many years to come.