Perplexity sued by Dow Jones & New York Post

Last week, The New York Times sent a cease and desist notice to AI startup Perplexity, telling the company to stop including the newspaper’s content in its AI powered search bot results.

Now the parent companies of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are coming for Perplexity.

Today, News Corp units Dow Jones & Company and NYP Holdings, Inc. together sued Perplexity for violating their copyright. The complaint filed in US District Court’s Southern District of New York accused the company of “massive freeriding” on the publications’ protected content. The suit said that Perplexity is scraping and storing WSJ and New York Post content and reproducing it verbatim.

“Perplexity accesses and copies, without authorization or remuneration, vast numbers of webpages containing copyrighted material, including from Plaintiffs’ webpages and third-party webpages containing Plaintiffs’ licensed copyrighted works,” wrote the plaintiffs.

Perplexity’s AI-powered chat bot responds to user queries with answers accompanied by citations linking back to the source information, and has been accused of ignoring websites’ robots.txt files, which tell automated crawlers if they are allowed to index and scrape that site’s content. As the lawsuit complaint notes, Perplexity allows users to “Skip the Links” when performing web searches.

The complaint notes, “This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”

Meanwhile, the company is fundraising at a blistering pace, and is working to raise $500 million as it positions itself as a replacement for the search engine.