AP Photo/Ron Harris
CNN has initiated legal action against Perplexity AI, alleging that the company has appropriated the cable news network's intellectual property.
The 54-page complaintwas submitted on Thursday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, andincluded1,165 pages of evidence showcasing CNN's copyrighted and trademarked material, which CNN claims Perplexity has "illegally duplicated," including "more than 17,000 CNN articles, videos, images, and other creations used to enhance its services and features."
As the chief media analyst for CNNBrian Stelter pointed out in his reportin the legal case, an increasing number of publishers, media organizations, and other content creators have filed a lawsuitAIcompanies accused of copyright violations, but this marks the first such legal action initiated by CNN and is thought to be the first brought by a television network.
News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News,The Wall Street Journal, and book publisher Harper Collins, among others),The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Encyclopedia Britannicahave all filed lawsuits against Perplexity. CNN's complaint was accompanied by two "Statements of Relatednessdeclaring its lawsuit 'asserts copyright claims that overlap with the claims brought against the same Defendant' by theTimes and Tribune, and that these "claims stem from largely similar actions, including the Defendant's use of CNN's content, such as articles and other material posted on CNN's Online Platforms, to develop the Defendant's artificial intelligence products and services."
"We anticipate significant overlap in the legal and factual issues across the cases, and classifying these cases as related would prevent redundant work, costs, and strains on the Court," the motions stated, mentioning that the law firm representing CNN also served as counsel for the plaintiffs in theTimes and Tribune cases.
"The legal actions are part of a broader initiative to guarantee that news sources receive proper payment in an environment where chatbots and other artificial intelligence technologies are delivering their news to users in large quantities," stated Stelter.
"You can't copyright information," said the chief communications officer of Perplexity. Jesse Dwyerstated in a comment to CNN.
A CNN representative issued the following statement to:
CNN actively leverages the opportunities that AI offers. For many years, we have been involved in the AI licensing market, maintaining several commercial partnerships, active agreements, and continuous conversations with responsible industry participants. CNN's legal action is based on the idea that Perplexity, a company worth tens of billions of dollars, should not be allowed to take content from those who produce the original material that Perplexity uses. The public depends on high-quality news journalism created by humans to comprehend their world, which is often risky and costly to produce. Commercial entities can and must pay for its usage. We would prefer them to do so through reasonable licensing deals, but if they decline, as Perplexity has done, they will need to cover the costs through legal settlements. There is no alternative.
CNN had a licensing deal with Meta last December, according to Stelter.
A major point mentioned in the complaint is that CNN attempted to discuss a content licensing agreement with Perplexity last year, but no deal was finalized.
"Consequently, prior to and following Perplexity's discussions with CNN, Perplexity was aware that it was not allowed to access CNN's content or utilize its trademarks or service marks," the lawsuit said.
The complaint stated that Perplexity violated CNN’s copyrights "in two main phases," the input and output processes.
The complaint mentioned that the infringement took place during the input phase, when "Perplexity copies CNN's content by crawling and scraping CNN's Digital Platforms and other sources using its own crawlers such as PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, as well as those from third parties that Perplexity depends on," and "by accessing and utilizing third-party indices and databases containing scraped CNN content."
Perplexity has "intentionally bypassed or avoided technical content protection mechanisms, such as robots.txt, which are specifically created to prevent such scraping and to direct web crawlers not to copy digital material," according to the complaint, and the company "admits openly that its Perplexity-User crawler 'typically disregards robots.txt guidelines.'"
Other media organizations, such as WIRED magazine, along with independent researchers, discovered proof that Perplexity disregarded the robots.txt protocol and bypassed firewalls, according to the complaint, which also alleged that Perplexity has "employed, and continues to use comparable hidden techniques to access CNN's material without authorization."
Concerning the output stage, the complaint highlighted that "extended responses from Perplexity’s GenAI Products frequently include full or partial direct copies of CNN’s protected content, especially when a user inquires about what CNN has covered," or "are rephrased into text that closely mirrors or provides detailed summaries of CNN’s protected works."
This involves "providing information behind CNN’s paywall without paying for that content," the lawsuit said, and "[t]hese reproductions extend well beyond the short excerpts usually displayed with standard search results."
The conclusion, the complaint stated, was that "users have reduced necessity to go to those [original] sources since their expressive content is already quoted or rephrased in the resulting text."
Perplexity's RAG results redirect traffic and income from copyright owners such as CNN," the lawsuit stated. "A user who has already read the most recent news or discovered the desired product, even—particularly—with credit to CNN, has minimal incentive to go to the original site or pay to access the article they just viewed.
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