CNN files lawsuit against Perplexity alleging unlawful content distribution

Read a summary of this article on FAST.
Get bite-sized news via a new
cards interface. Give it a try.
Click here to return to FAST Tap here to return to FAST
FAST

May 28 : CNN on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York federal court, alleging the AI search engine provider is unlawfully distributing its copyrighted content, marking the latest legal tussle between the AI firm and a news publisher. 

The complaint said that Perplexity unlawfully copied thousands of CNN stories, videos and images to power its products and distributes "identical or substantially similar" competing content.

"You can't copyright facts," Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said in response to the lawsuit.

CNN is asking for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking Perplexity from violating its intellectual property rights.

CNA Games

Guess Word
Crack the word, one row at a time

Buzzword
Create words using the given letters

Mini Sudoku
Tiny puzzle, mighty brain teaser

Mini Crossword
Small grid, big challenge

Word Search
Spot as many words as you can
Show More
Show Less

"CNN's lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits," the Warner Bros.-owned news company said in a statement. 

"By exploiting CNN’s reporting in this manner, Perplexity violates the protections afforded by copyright law and undermines the economic incentives that make original newsgathering possible," CNN said in the complaint.

Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, news publishers and writers have worried about their content being repurposed to appear in the results of a chatbot query, sparking battles over copyright, compensation and ownership.

CNN's lawsuit is one of dozens of high-stakes U.S. cases brought by copyright owners including news outlets, authors and publishers against tech companies over alleged misuse of their work to train large language models. Anthropic was the first AI company to settle one of these cases last year, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit from a group of authors.

The CNN suit is the latest in a series of legal challenges brought against Perplexity, which uses AI to scour websites and answer users' queries, alleging the company has infringed copyrights and unlawfully scraped data to train its technology.

Perplexity is also facing lawsuits from the New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones, among others.

Several news firms have now signed licensing deals and partnerships with Big Tech and generative AI companies to ensure that their models have access to verified sources of news, while also compensating publishers and linking back to original articles. 

Newsletter

Week in Review

Subscribe to our Chief Editor’s Week in Review

Our chief editor shares analysis and picks of the week's biggest news every Saturday.

Sign up for our newsletters

Get our pick of top stories and thought-provoking articles in your inbox

Subscribe here

Get the CNA app

Stay updated with notifications for breaking news and our best stories

Download here

Get WhatsApp alerts

Join our channel for the top reads for the day on your preferred chat app

Join here