The New York Times v. Perplexity AI: New Frontiers in IP and AI | JD Supra

The New York Times recently filed a major lawsuit against the artificial intelligence platform Perplexity AI for infringement of intellectual property rights. The importance of this lawsuit lies in the fact that it does not rely solely on “classic” claims of copyright infringement, but also includes innovative claims of trademark violations and damages.

Lawsuit Against Perplexity AI

A few days ago, the New York Times, which has previously filed several lawsuits against artificial intelligence platforms (including OpenAI and Microsoft), filed another lawsuit—this time against Perplexity AI—with a court in New York. Perplexity AI operates an AI-based search engine that scrapes information from the internet in real time and displays the results in an accessible and synthesized format for users.

The newspaper’s main allegations include:

• Copyright infringement: The New York Times alleges that Perplexity AI committed massive, methodical, and unlawful copyright infringement through unauthorized copying and dissemination of the newspaper’s copyrighted content, which Perplexity AI also used to train and power its AI models. According to the newspaper, the infringements relate to millions of articles and was carried out via sophisticated bots (crawlers) and by scraping vast amounts of content from the nytimes.com website.
• Impact on users:  According to the New York Times, Perplexity’s GenAI products, which are based on copyrighted articles, are verbatim (or…