CNN has joined the growing ranks of media companies suing Perplexity for copyright infringement. The cable news network has accused the AI search company of “massive copyright infringement” that includes wrongfully scraping its website and copying more than 17,000 pieces of its content.
The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday, claims that the AI company “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN’s content from CNN Digital Platforms and third-party platforms.” It also accuses the AI tools of reproducing “verbatim copies” of its articles, including paywalled stories, in query responses to users. Perplexity’s AI tools allegedly have incorrectly attributed “hallucinated” content to CNN, which the company says in the suit violates its trademark.
“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,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet. “The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it.”
CNN is far from the first media company to sue Perplexity for scraping content without permission. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Reddit, Merriam-Webster, Encyclopedia Britannica and Nikkei have also filed lawsuits against the company. “You can’t copyright facts,” Perplexity’s Chief Communications Officer Jesse Dwyer said in a statement to CNN.
Interestingly, it seems that Perplexity was at one point trying to strike a deal with CNN that would have allowed it to use some of the network’s content. According to the lawsuit, the two companies were in negotiations last year that would have made paywalled CNN content available to Perplexity’s paid subscribers. The deal ultimately fell through, but Perplexity continued to use CNN’s name and content in its products despite warnings from the TV network’s legal team. Perplexity never responded, the lawsuit says.
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