CNN is suing Perplexity, accusing the AI company of illegally copying and distributing CNN content.
Thursday’s lawsuit joins a long list of lawsuits against generative AI startups by publishers such as the New York Times. However, this is CNN’s first AI copyright lawsuit and is believed to be a first for any television network.
The lawsuit is part of a larger effort to ensure news providers receive fair compensation in a world where chatbots and other AI tools deliver news to consumers at scale.
Major news companies are taking a two-pronged approach, filing copyright infringement lawsuits in some cases and signing content licensing agreements with AI companies in others.
“CNN’s lawsuit represents the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from the companies that create the original content that Perplexity exploits,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement. “The public relies on high-quality human-reported news journalism to make sense of their world, but it is often dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to access it.”
According to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, CNN tried to enter into a content deal with Perplexity last year but could not agree to terms.
“As a result, both before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not authorized to access CNN’s content or use its trademarks and service marks,” the complaint states.
In a statement, the network emphasized that it is “actively leveraging the opportunities created by AI” and has “several commercial partnerships, active agreements, and ongoing discussions with responsible industry players.”
One such deal, with Meta, was made public last December.
In a statement, CNN said it wants “sensible licensing agreements” with carriers, “but if we refuse, we will have to pay legal damages, as Perplexity has previously refused to do. We have no free choice.”
News Corp, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Encyclopedia Britannica and Japanese media company Yomiuri Shimbun have also taken legal action against Perplexity in the past two years.
However, publishers such as Gannett, TIME, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel announced deals with Perplexity around the same time.
Earlier this year, Perplexity said in a legal response to the Times and Tribune that “any attempt to block this new technology by monopolizing the facts will be founded on the fundamental principles of intellectual property law that have consistently allowed innovative technologies like Perplexity to exist.”
