Perplexity Responds to Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

(Reuters) – Perplexity said on Thursday that the allegations of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed by Dow Jones and the New York Post were misleading, and vowed to defend itself.

The media conglomerate News Corp-owned publishers sued California-based Perplexity on Monday, claiming that the startup engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their copyrighted work.

The lawsuit states that Perplexity did not respond to a letter sent by the two news publishers in July, informing it of the legal issues raised by its unauthorized use of copyrighted works and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal.

Perplexity denied this in a blog post on Thursday, stating that it responded to the letter the same day and "instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit."

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, expressed his surprise at the lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post against the search startup, mentioning this during the WSJ Tech Live conference on Wednesday.

This lawsuit marks the latest development in the ongoing conflict between publishers and tech companies over unauthorized use of copyrighted content in AI systems.

Perplexity is among the leading startups trying to disrupt the search engine market, traditionally dominated by Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s Google. The company compiles information from webpages it considers authoritative and provides summaries directly within its tool.