Key Points
- Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun have filed a joint lawsuit against Perplexity for copying and storing their articles without permission.
- publisher revenue‑sharing subscription launched by Perplexity costs $5 per month and offers 80 percent of revenue to participating publishers.
- The lawsuit seeks damages and the removal of any stored content that Perplexity allegedly used.
- Earlier reports claim Perplexity’s crawlers bypass robots.txt and firewalls, impersonating generic browsers.
- Forbes and Wired have also accused Perplexity of unauthorized content scraping from their publications.
Background
Perplexity, an AI‑driven search platform, has come under scrutiny for its handling of news content. Two of Japan’s largest media organizations, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, allege that the company accessed and stored articles from their servers without permission. According to the lawsuit, Perplexary then supplied inaccurate information to users and attributed those inaccuracies to the media companies themselves.
Lawsuit Details
The joint legal action seeks monetary compensation and the removal of any stored articles. The plaintiffs request that Perplexity be ordered to delete the content it allegedly copied and to pay damages for the alleged infringement. The lawsuit claims that Perplexity’s actions amount to large‑scale, ongoing “free riding” on the work of journalists, who invest significant time and effort into their reporting.
Perplexity’s Publisher Initiative
In the midst of the legal dispute, Perplexity announced a new subscription offering aimed at publishers. The service, priced at $5 per month, promises “premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists.” Under the plan, publishers are slated to receive 80 percent of the revenue, initially drawn from a $42.5 million pool. Critics note that the payout translates to approximately $4 per publisher for providing an entire library of content, a figure that contrasts with the $20 to $30 many newspapers currently charge for direct access.
The company also runs a Publisher Program that shares ad revenue with participating outlets based on user interactions with summarized articles, rather than full‑text reads. This model is presented as a way for publishers to monetize content that appears in Perplexity’s “summary” format.
Earlier Scraping Allegations
Perplexity’s practices have attracted attention beyond the Japanese lawsuit. A Cloudflare report earlier in the year alleged that the firm deployed web crawlers designed to circumvent robots.txt files and firewalls, masquerading as generic browsers and rotating IP addresses unrelated to the company. Additional accusations surfaced from major media outlets, including Forbes, which claimed that Perplexity illicitly reproduced its stories, and Wired, which reported similar scraping of Condé Nast‑owned publications.
Industry Reactions
The lawsuit underscores growing concerns among traditional news organizations about AI platforms harvesting and repurposing their content without compensation or proper attribution. While Perplexity’s revenue‑sharing model appears to address publisher compensation, critics argue that the terms may undervalue the extensive libraries provided. The legal action by Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun highlights a broader push by media companies to assert control over their intellectual property in an era of rapidly evolving AI technologies.
Source: engadget.com