Dow Jones & Co. and the New York Post are suing the AI startup Perplexity for copyright infringement, according to Variety. The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges Perplexity illegally copies copyrighted works to divert readers and revenue from publishers. Perplexity’s platform allows users to “skip the links” to original publisher websites, effectively bypassing the source of the content. Dow Jones and the Post claim they contacted Perplexity in July 2024 about the issue and offered to discuss licensing, but received no response. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson condemned Perplexity, calling its actions an “abuse of intellectual property.”
This is not the first time Perplexity has made headlines in this way. Recently, the New York Times forbid the AI search engine to use the newspaper’s content.