May 28 (Reuters) – CNN on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, 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.
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“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.
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 on copyrighted content and unlawfully scraped data to train its technology.
Perplexity is facing lawsuits from the New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones, among others.
“The public rely on high-quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it,” the CNN statement said.
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“We prefer that they do so through sensible licensing arrangements, but if they refuse to do that as Perplexity has so far refused to do, they will have to pay through legal damages. There is no free option.”
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, news publishers and writers have been concerned about their content being repurposed to appear in the results of a chatbot query, sparking battles over copyright, compensation and ownership.
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.
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(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda)
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