By Walter Schulze
Publication Date: 2026-10-22 08:26:00
A copyright fight that started with scraped headlines two years ago is now heading to a jury, just as Perplexity tries to close a funding round that would value it above $30 billion.
Fact discovery closed on July 20, 2026, in Dow Jones & Company v. Perplexity AI, the copyright and trademark case News Corp’s Dow Jones and the New York Post filed against the AI search startup in the Southern District of New York. The case is numbered 1:24-cv-07984. Court filings reviewed by legal trade publications tracking the docket show it’s now moving toward expert discovery, due by October 19, 2026, with a pretrial conference held in September. The lawsuit that once looked like a routine scraping dispute has become, two years after it was filed, one of the more closely watched tests of whether an AI search engine can survive discovery without publishers proving it fabricates the news it claims to summarize.
The case began on October 21, 2024, when Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity in Manhattan federal court, accusing it of what the complaint called a “brazen scheme” of mass copying. Dow Jones and the Post said they’d sent Perplexity a letter back in July 2024 offering to discuss a licensing deal and got no response before the suit landed. Perplexity disputed that account almost immediately. In a blog post, the company said it had replied to the July letter the same day it arrived, called the lawsuit’s framing “misleading,” and pointed to revenue-sharing deals it…
