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The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement (techcrunch.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the pay-up dept.
The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of repackaging its paywalled reporting without permission. TechCrunch reports: The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times' suit claims that "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute" for the outlet, "without permission or remuneration." [...] "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work."

Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. "Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the suit reads. "Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works."

Or, as James put it in his statement, "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."
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The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement More

The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement

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  • This might be a tangent... (Score:3)

    by Travelsonic ( 870859 ) on Friday December 05, 2025 @04:31PM (#65838049) Journal
    This might be a bit of a tangent, but I wonder how much of their stuff is truly paywalled - given that you do seem to get some % of articles that are free outright, it seems you also can see some% that are free before a paywall pops up, and other articles where you can either pause the page load, or do ctrl+a and ctrl+c to select the article before the paywall goes up (and then paste into a text editor to view at your leisure).

    Not to mention the question of how many articles from the NY Times are claimed to be paywalled that are of older content - as in, stuff that would be public domain being pre-1929 (and available elsewhere as well).

    For me, it just seems like a lot that hinges on what actually is truly paywalled, if soft paywalls count (like the one I mentioned where you can copy the text before a paywall pops up), and the like.
    • Legally that makes sense. Although, I really think AI's paying content producers for providing access to their information is the right way to go, long term. If NYT is going to hire reporters to go places and find out stuff somebody has to pay for it. AI is great partially because it bypasses the horrendous mess the Web has become, but that's too good to last.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Are News Articles Protected by Copyright Law?

      News articles receive copyright protection the moment they are created. This protection is automatic, beginning as soon as the work is recorded in a tangible form like being written or published online. ..."

      https://legalclarity.org/are-n... [legalclarity.org]

    • Bypassing technological measure to violate copyright is a crime, even if those technical measures are easily bypassed. See [DMCA] 17USC 1201a

      (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

      (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological mea

      • Bypassing technological measure to violate copyright is a crime, even if those technical measures are easily bypassed. See [DMCA] 17USC 1201a

        But if the text is already loaded and just hidden after the fact - which absolutely is the case at least some% of the time, you don't, in any reasonable sense of the term, bypass anything, the information is already there. Not to mention the free articles w/o paywall one can and sometimes will get to access.

    • I don't know what you mean by "free"? But on the off chance you mean "free as in beer" I will point out that the owner of said beers has the right to offer the beer free to one person, while not making it free for another person or even AI for that matter.

      Just because the NYT allowed someone to see an article for free does not mean, ipso facto, that *you* are entitled to see that article for free yourself. In particular copyright is not transitive.

    • Well I'm sure the fine article would have those details, except the entire article appears to be one line:
      "This content is not available in your region"

  • If the nytimes articles are truly hidden behind a paywall, how does perplexity get access to it?

    • They probably have multiple accounts with paid subscriptions connecting from IPs around the world scraping data 24/7. Setting that up would be trivial with the budgets AI companies have.

      • That may not be fair ball.

        If they were just scraping whatever they find on the web, more-or-less at random, then that's one thing.

        If they're taking positive steps to buy subscriptions for the sole purpose of scraping that content, that's something else.

    • I've often wondered this, until I came across this story on slashdot [slashdot.org] whereby authors of browser addons/extensions are approached to generate money from their hard work if they covertly add a javascript file similar to Mellowtel [github.com] which essentially spies on browser traffic/scrapes webpages [arstechnica.com] so each user unknowingly becomes a bot.

      Sadly most addons are never monitored, and even if they have approval [mozilla.org], they can just as easily slip in the few lines of code to import the js script in the next minor release.

      ... critics say the monetization works by using the browser extensions to scrape websites on behalf of paying customers, which include AI startups, according to MellowTel founder Arsian Ali. Tuckner (security researcher) reached this conclusion after uncovering close ties between MellowTel and Olostep, a company that bills itself as "the world's most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API." Olostep says its service "avoids all bot detection and can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes." Paying customers submit the locations of browsers they want to access specific webpages. Olostep then uses its installed base of extension users to fulfill the request.

    • The paywall does not actually block access to the information: it just uses javascript to halt display of the text by your browser -but it already sent the text to your browser. To Perplexity, the javascript is just another block of text sent as a response to the wget request.

      The NY Times could actually require a successful login to access data on their website -but that would prevent search index spiders from cataloging what they are offering. Then only their subscribers would see their content... and no

      • Some paywalls do indeed work this way, but nytimes is not none of them. It cuts the text off in the html so the article text is not there to be read unless you have a subscription.

        • It cuts the text off in the html so the article text is not there to be read unless you have a subscription.

          Yeah, cuts it off ... after all the text is already loaded. Been able to copy and paste article text to read at my leisure many times.

          • Nope. You can verify this yourself by looking at what gets loaded in the browser. The first page is loaded, then the bottom half of that page is cut-off. The entire article itself is never sent to you unless you're logged in.

            • Maybe I just look at a lot of single page articles then ...
            • And I did some Googling, it seems as if I am not completely balmy and there is a so called "metered paywall" where you can read X articles for free and periodically resets.

    • They want to drink a glass of water without getting their mouth wet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Because NYT is not playing fair. They open the paywall to bots to get listed so you have unusable Google results (and a small percentage may sign up instead of clicking the next result) and AI scrapers are run from the same IP ranges as search engine bots. If they wanted a secure paywall every serious web developer would know how to build a secure login system. They actively invest work to build a semi-open paywall page.

  • Where do the AI companies plan to get their data after they put all the news outlets and publishers of nonfiction out of business? Will there just be nothing written after 2030 in their results? Or will the AIs just hallucinate everything?

  • When did publishers ever sue TV or Radio makers?

    I'm kind of surprised that MLB hasn't sued AI companies yet for reproducing descriptions of baseball games. Maybe they just aren't paying attention.

    • "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."

      I also wondered about this, came across as a fairly good argument, so I checked with AI ;)
      Initially it summarised each point, but when I probed it further, including checking its own sources, it came back with: -

      * AP v. KVOS (1936): [historylink.org] The Associated Press sued KVOS, a Washington radio station, alleging unfair competition for reading newspaper stories verbatim on air; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the station's favor on a technicality, but the case catalyzed licensing arrangements between news services and r

      • Did you confirm these cases, since Ai is known to make up legal precedents and cite non-existent rulings?

        • Did you confirm these cases

          They are literally links to the cases. Jesus Christ I've met single celled organisms with more brains than you.

  • The irony of the NYTimes complaining on copyrights given their history of reporters found guilt of or complicit in plagiarism is not lost to me.

  • We need to sue them too - the NYT have been kind enough to put up a wall to protect us from their recycled drivel and now Perplexity have covertly injected some of it into our minds. Wtf!?!

  • I'm ready for New York Times to just go out of business, like so many other legacy platforms.

  • The NY Times seems to be unaware that the activity they cite is very much what they do to provide the articles they claim are in some way being stolen. It would be fun to see their reaction when their non-payed sources sue their sorry asterisks.
    {^_^}

  • Fortunately Perplexity never used a paywalled source in my queries, other than Google what sometimes had three inaccessible links on the first page.

  • NYT doesn't like competition.

  • Let's ditch all forms of IP and settle this war forever. Agreed?
    This will slow down the progress but will give the atmosphere, the oceans and all the species ample time to recover. Agreed?
    This will slow down the progress but will give social imbalance, political imbalance and racial imbalance enough time to adjust against concentrated wealth and power accumulation. Now agreed?

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