An encyclopedia and dictionary company have sued a generative artificial intelligence (AI) company alleging massive copying of their content without authorization.
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Inc., accusing Perplexity AI, Inc. of copyright and trademark infringement.
Investor Jeff Bezos backs Perplexity, which uses AI to offer users answer engine services.
Park further alleges that the output under Perplexity’s RAG model is often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of the original copyrighted works.
In response to a request for comment, a Perplexity spokesperson said the legal action is a desperate attempt by a legacy publisher to stifle technological innovation and to save Britannica's business.
“The lawsuit has nothing to do with Perplexity,” Perplexity's head of communication Jesse Dwyer told NTD. “The lawsuit is nothing more than a last-ditch effort by Britannica to salvage its failing IPO, announced more than a year ago and with zero chance of success in an era when users have yet again shown their obvious preference for modern technology.”
"We have invested significantly to uphold a high editorial standard with rigorous fact-checking processes so that our users, who generate more than 200 million sessions per month, can trust the information and knowledge we provide them," Cauz said. "Perplexity claims to be the 'world's first answer engine' but the answers they provide to consumers are often Britannica's answers."
The potential for the lawsuit to raise questions about the scope of fair use in U.S. copyright law fascinates attorneys like Banner and Witcoff lawyer Kirk Sigmon, who predicts a precedent could be set.
"Any judicial decisions here are likely to have massive implications for the scope of fair use as it applies to web data scraping," Sigmon told NTD. "It might also further refine the rapidly evolving legal understanding of the legality of use of material for training data."
Patent attorney Mark Trenner believes the law needs time to catch up with AI, which is ushering in a new technology era.
"The tech companies are going to push the boundaries and this lawsuit will actually help define the boundaries in the future, whether those boundaries are a clarification by the courts of the Fair Use Doctrine, or whether they will need to implement private contractual agreements to use the underlying copyrighted works," Trenner told NTD.