The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0180300159
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/12/05/2021202/the-new-york-times-is-suing-perplexity-for-copyright-infringement
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/05/the-new-york-times-is-suing-perplexity-for-copyright-infringement/
> The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, [2]including the Chicago Tribune , which also filed suit this week. The Times' suit claims that "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute" for the outlet, "without permission or remuneration." [...] "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work."
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> Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. "Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the suit reads. "Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works."
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> Or, as James put it in his statement, "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/05/the-new-york-times-is-suing-perplexity-for-copyright-infringement/
[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/04/chicago-tribune-perplexity-ai-copyright-infringement/
Re: (Score:2)
Because it "damages its [NYT's] brand." I'm still trying to figure out how that's possible.
Re: Is it just my Alzheimer's? (Score:1)
Are you saying that if I ask AI what Tesla would have thought about new tsunami wave observations, it will hallucinate what the NY Times would say?
If it's behind paywall how do they get it? (Score:1)
If the nytimes articles are truly hidden behind a paywall, how does perplexity get access to it?
Re: If it's behind paywall how do they get it? (Score:1)
They probably have multiple accounts with paid subscriptions connecting from IPs around the world scraping data 24/7. Setting that up would be trivial with the budgets AI companies have.
Re: (Score:1)
That may not be fair ball.
If they were just scraping whatever they find on the web, more-or-less at random, then that's one thing.
If they're taking positive steps to buy subscriptions for the sole purpose of scraping that content, that's something else.
Re: (Score:2)
I've often wondered this, until I came across [1]this story on slashdot [slashdot.org] whereby authors of browser addons/extensions are approached to generate money from their hard work if they covertly add a javascript file similar to [2]Mellowtel [github.com] which essentially [3]spies on browser traffic/scrapes webpages [arstechnica.com] so each user unknowingly becomes a bot.
Sadly most addons are never monitored, and even if they have [4]approval [mozilla.org], they can just as easily slip in the few lines of code to import the js script in the next minor release.
> ... critics say the monetization works by using the browser extensions to scrape websites on behalf of paying customers, which include AI startups, according to MellowTel founder Arsian Ali. Tuckner (security researcher) reached this conclusion after uncovering close ties between MellowTel and Olostep, a company that bills itself as "the world's most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API." Olostep says its service "avoids all bot detection and can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes." Paying customers submit the locations of browsers they want to access specific webpages. Olostep then uses its installed base of extension users to fulfill the request.
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/09/2257245/browser-extensions-turn-nearly-1-million-browsers-into-website-scraping-bots
[2] https://github.com/mellowtel-inc/mellowtel-js
[3] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/browser-extensions-turn-nearly-1-million-browsers-into-website-scraping-bots/
[4] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges?#w_recommended-extensions
Re: (Score:2)
The paywall does not actually block access to the information: it just uses javascript to halt display of the text by your browser -but it already sent the text to your browser. To Perplexity, the javascript is just another block of text sent as a response to the wget request.
The NY Times could actually require a successful login to access data on their website -but that would prevent search index spiders from cataloging what they are offering. Then only their subscribers would see their content... and no
The AI companies are going to kill themselves. (Score:1)
Where do the AI companies plan to get their data after they put all the news outlets and publishers of nonfiction out of business? Will there just be nothing written after 2030 in their results? Or will the AIs just hallucinate everything?
I must have missed those lawsuits (Score:2)
When did publishers ever sue TV or Radio makers?
I'm kind of surprised that MLB hasn't sued AI companies yet for reproducing descriptions of baseball games. Maybe they just aren't paying attention.
This might be a tangent... (Score:3)
This might be a bit of a tangent, but I wonder how much of their stuff is truly paywalled - given that you do seem to get some % of articles that are free outright, it seems you also can see some% that are free before a paywall pops up, and other articles where you can either pause the page load, or do ctrl+a and ctrl+c to select the article before the paywall goes up (and then paste into a text editor to view at your leisure).
Not to mention the question of how many articles from the NY Times are claimed to be paywalled that are of older content - as in, stuff that would be public domain being pre-1929 (and available elsewhere as well).
For me, it just seems like a lot that hinges on what actually is truly paywalled, if soft paywalls count (like the one I mentioned where you can copy the text before a paywall pops up), and the like.
Re: (Score:2)
Legally that makes sense. Although, I really think AI's paying content producers for providing access to their information is the right way to go, long term. If NYT is going to hire reporters to go places and find out stuff somebody has to pay for it. AI is great partially because it bypasses the horrendous mess the Web has become, but that's too good to last.
Re: (Score:2)
Bypassing technological measure to violate copyright is a crime, even if those technical measures are easily bypassed. See [DMCA] 17USC 1201a
> (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
> (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological mea