Merriam Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica Sue AI Firm Perplexity Over Copyright
Merriam Webster and its parent company Encyclopedia Britannica have filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Perplexity. The legal action accuses Perplexitys AI powered answer engine of unlawfully copying their copyrighted materials to generate responses for users.
The complaint was filed in a federal court in New York. The plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order to prevent Perplexity from continuing to misuse their content. A central allegation is that Perplexitys product directly harms publishers by creating responses that eliminate the need for users to click through to the original websites, thereby starving those sites of vital web traffic and revenue.
The lawsuit further claims that Perplexity engages in massive and unauthorized copying of protected content from Britannica, Merriam Webster, and other web publishers to build its competing product. This copying is done without permission and without providing any payment to the content creators.
A unique aspect of this case involves the issue of AI hallucinations. The plaintiffs also allege copyright infringement for instances where the Perplexity AI invents false or inaccurate information and then wrongly attributes those fabrications to Britannica or Merriam Webster. This, they argue, misleads users and damages the reputations of the established reference works.
This is not the first time Perplexity has faced such legal challenges. Last year, the company was sued for copyright infringement by media giants the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The allegations in those cases were very similar, centering on the unauthorized use of published content to train and fuel its AI systems.
Just last month, the AI firm was hit with another lawsuit from two major Japanese media companies, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun. They too accused Perplexity of stealing their information and, concerningly, of sometimes presenting false information that was incorrectly credited to their publications.
The case highlights the growing tension between generative AI companies and content creators. Publishers argue that AI models are built by scraping vast amounts of data from the internet without consent or compensation, creating products that then directly compete with the very sources they rely on. The outcome of this lawsuit could have significant implications for how AI companies train their models and how copyright law is interpreted in the age of artificial intelligence.
