Perplexity strikes back at Wall Street Journal, New York Post copyright suit

Perplexity fired back at the News Corps-owned (NASDAQ:NWS)(NASDAQ:NWSA) Wall Street Journal and New York Post for a copyright infringement lawsuit filed this week.

“The lawsuit reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is—while depressingly familiar—fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating,” Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine backed by names such as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, said in a blog post today.

The lawsuit accused the AI startup of taking copyrighted news content to generate answers for search users, thereby steering web traffic away from publisher websites. It is one of dozens of lawsuits filed by publishers against generative AI companies in the past year.

For example, the New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) has sued Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and OpenAI for copyright infringement, and sent a “cease and desist” notice to Perplexity.

“The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” Perplexity said. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

Perplexity insists it always lists sources above answers and provides in-line citations in its answers to AI search queries. The company also asserts the complaints made in this case won’t hold up in a court of law.

“AI-enhanced search engines are not going away,” Perplexity noted. “Perplexity is not going away. We look forward to a time in the future when we can focus all of our energy and attention on offering innovative tools to customers, in collaboration with media companies.”

Some of these collaborations have already begun. Perplexity has entered into a revenue sharing program with TIME, Fortune and Der Spiegel. OpenAI and Microsoft announced earlier this week it is working with a multitude of news outlets to advance AI solutions in the newsroom.