CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in New York federal court, alleging the AI search engine provider is unlawfully distributing its copyrighted content, marking the latest legal battle between the AI firm and a news publisher. The complaint, filed Thursday, claims Perplexity copied thousands of CNN stories, videos, and images to power its products and distribute “identical or substantially similar” competing content.

“You can’t copyright facts,” Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said in response. CNN is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order blocking Perplexity from violating its intellectual property rights. The Warner Bros.-owned news company stated, “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 complaint argues that Perplexity’s actions violate copyright protections and undermine the economic incentives that make original newsgathering possible. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, news publishers have feared their content being repurposed in chatbot results, sparking disputes over copyright, compensation, and ownership.

CNN’s lawsuit is one of dozens of high-stakes US cases brought by copyright owners against tech companies over alleged misuse of their work to train large language models. Anthropic was the first AI company to settle such a case last year, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit from a group of authors.

Perplexity also faces lawsuits from The New York Times, Reddit, and Dow Jones. Meanwhile, several news firms have signed licensing deals with Big Tech and generative AI companies to ensure verified news sources while compensating publishers and linking back to original articles.

Source: www.aljazeera.com