Japanese Media Groups Sue AI Search Engine Perplexity Over Alleged Copyright Infringement (ft.com) 14
Two of Japan's largest media groups are suing AI search engine Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement, joining a growing list of news publishers taking legal action against AI companies using their content. FT: Japanese media group Nikkei, which owns the Financial Times, and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said in statements on Tuesday that they had jointly filed a lawsuit in Tokyo. The groups join a number of Western media companies taking legal action against Perplexity, which provides answers to questions with sources and citations, using large language models (LLMs) from platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Japanese news providers claim Perplexity has, without permission, "copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi" and ignored a "technical measure" designed to prevent this from happening. They claim that Perplexity's answers have given incorrect information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies."
The Japanese news providers claim Perplexity has, without permission, "copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi" and ignored a "technical measure" designed to prevent this from happening. They claim that Perplexity's answers have given incorrect information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies."
ohh now they're a 'search' company (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this some kind of media effort to claim there's really no difference between an LLM and a search engine?
Please actually ask someone who understands algorithms and data structures why this might not work out. The fact google have poisoned their search with advertising does not mean that's normal.
Re:ohh now they're a 'search' company (Score:4, Insightful)
That would hold more legal water than simply having different browser agent from lets say Chrome.
I'd look to see what their claims were, but sadly they are demanding a subscription to see the post, so I guess Perplexity didn't pay the toll. (I guess TFS is also a fair warning to anyone trying to get TFA without paying them.)
Re:ohh now they're a 'search' company (Score:4, Interesting)
After a little searching, I can confirm that the case has been submitted to the Tokyo courts... so US law isn't the primary concern here... but further our web based rationalisations are pretty secondary in their claims... which do appear to be about using private information and relaying it.
The complaint cites lost revenue and readership for articles farmed by crawlers, and Yomiuri Shimbun co (who are incidentally the largest newspaper corp in Japan, apparently) appear to be claiming that they have differential data to back this up.
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Obviously Perplexity should send a talented AI lawyer over Zoom, to defend t
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Cool. They have a much larger chance of winning in Japan than in the US.
Japan has pretty strict intellectual property laws. They don't have the concept of "fair use", so Perplexity is unable attempt to skew any such provisions to suit their purposes.
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If they have good analysis data, that may be a deathblow to the practice of the AI pirates of just scraping anything they can get their hands on. About time.
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Perplexity argues they don't need to respect robots.txt as long as their requests represents a user click via an agent.
Crawling: Needs robots.txt check
Accessing for a user (agent instead of browser): Needs no check (the browser wouldn't check either)
I guess that's reasonable, but people are still afraid of everything with AI in its name "stealing" their data.
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I, too, can have an isolated conversation with myself and call it rational. I should not expect the other people affected by my rationalisation to automatically agree with me, lest they take it as an invitation to show me how wrong I am.
Re: ohh now they're a 'search' company (Score:2)
Is this some kind of media effort to claim there's really no difference between an LLM and a search engine?
Please actually ask someone who understands algorithms and data structures why this might not work out. The fact google have poisoned their search with advertising does not mean that's normal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
We're finally beginning to realize this goal, using LLMs. This talk about what a true search engine is, it's funny. No, they're not search engines powered by ad-network heuristics or link popularity, and they're not indexes powered by keyword matching. I guess you could call it semantic search because the web didn't change to accommodate machines, machines caught up to us, or our junk we put on the web anyways.
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They are simply lying in the hopes of keeping the scam going a while longer. They _know_ what they are doing is illegal.
Ignore a technical measure? (Score:3)
If someone can simply "ignore a technical measure" to do something you don't want them to do, it doesn't seem like your measure was all that "technical".
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The legal meaning is that you signaled negative consent. It is a pretty strong thing.