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Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets sue Perplexity AI for allegedly engaging in ‘massive freeriding’

  • CNN
  • October 21, 2024
New York

CNN

 — 

Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post sued Perplexity on Monday, accusing the generative AI company of illegally scraping its reporting and diverting traffic to its own platforms.

The News Corp-owned companies accused Perplexity of training its so-called answer machine using copyrighted material, using scraped content to generate responses to users' questions, allowing them to circumvent news publishers' websites.

"What Perplexity does not tout is that its core business model involves engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs' protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience, and in turn to deprive Plaintiffs of critical revenue sources," the complaint alleges.

In a statement, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp., said the AI company "perpetrates an abuse of intellectual property that harms journalists, writers, publishers and News Corp."

"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. "Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip the links', apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check."

A Perplexity spokesperson did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.