Dow Jones and New York Post Sue AI Startup Perplexity, Alleging 'Massive' Copyright Infringement (variety.com) 7
News Corp's Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have sued Perplexity, a startup that calls itself an "AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity," alleging copyright infringement. From a report: "Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence company that claims to provide its users accurate and up-to-date news and information in a platform that, in Perplexity's own words, allows users to 'Skip the Links' to original publishers' websites," the companies said in the federal lawsuit, filed Monday. "Perplexity attempts to accomplish this by engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers' copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders. This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce."
Re: (Score:1)
Facts aren't copyrightable. So the valuable content that news provides isn't copyrightable, it's only the valueless content that is.
If I get an AI to rewrite a book and redraw all the pictures but holding the same information then is that legal?
Then why haven't people created un-copyrightable textbooks from all that are out there?
Sued the wrong company? (Score:3)
This lawsuit also seems wrong for another reason -- The reason I use Perplexity is because it provides the links and I do check the sources. So winding up as one of the authoritative sources for Perplexity leads to link-following -- they are arguing the opposite of this.
Re:Sued the wrong company? (Score:4, Insightful)
They use their own LLM that is fine-tuned from Llama.
Paid subscribers have the option to use GPT4o for the text generation part from the sources.
ChatGPT model is not a publicly APIed model. Only OpenAI can use the model behind ChatGPT.
The Complaint (Score:3)
Kill the gatekeepers (Score:2, Insightful)
They just want to be able to keep making money on old information instead of going out and creating new content. But I wonder if what they are really worried about is an AI pulling back the curtain and revealing to the world how much of their content is bullshit.
Google is the one to watch (Score:2)
With Google being forced (by governments) to pay for using headlines and links to news sites in some countries, it's only a matter of time before it applies AI to the task of reading, summarizing and personalizing all the news for its users.
Since nobody knows more about YOU than Google, it will use AI to create a news page that is highly relevant to your interests and needs. It will do so without copying verbatim from the online news sources it crawls and thus it will not infringe copyright.
Once this happe