Perplexity sued by Britannica and Merriam-Webster for violation of copyright
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit filed against the AI company Perplexity AI. They accuse Perplexity of unlawfully using copyrighted content.
According to the plaintiffs, Perplexity copies articles from their websites using software to collect, use and reproduce content without the necessary licences.
Perplexity’s answer engine often generates answers that work from that copied content: sometimes word for word or partial quotes.
Britannica and Merriam-Webster claim that these practices divert traffic from their sites – users search through Perplexity, are shown summaries, rather than going to the original websites – which hurts their advertising revenue, subscriptions and overall traffic.
The plaintiffs also claim that Perplexity is violating trademark rights by attributing AI-generated or fictitious content to their trademarks.
The case has been filed in the US Federal Court for the Southern District of New York.
In a separate development with implication for AI-generated content, Penske Media, the company that owns titles such as Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety, on Friday filed a lawsuit against Google in a federal court in Washington DC. Penske accuses the tech giant of using its journalism for AI summaries, known as AI Overviews, without permission.
Penske argues that Google’s dominance in the search engine market-with about 90% market share in the US-forces publishers to either be included in search results or have their content used for free in AI summaries.
According to the media group, this practice has led to a significant drop in site traffic and affiliate revenues-more than a third below peak levels at the end of 2024.
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