Attorneys for The Times warned in an Oct. 2 letter to Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, that the2-year-old San Francisco-based AI startup was unlawfully using content produced by The Times and demanded that it immediately cease unauthorized access and use of Times content.
"Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times' expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license," states The Times' letter, which is signed "Very truly yours" by attorney Steven Lieberman, of the Washington-based intellectual property law firm Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC.
The Times said in its letter that it never authorized Perplexity, or any other third party, to use its content in connection with a generative AI product and that despite Perplexity's assurances that it was not using third-party crawlers that ignore robots.txt files — which tell robots which pages they can and cannot access on a website —The Times' content continues to appear in Perplexity's AI search engine.
Perplexity, which has received funding from tech heavyweights such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and AI chipmaker Nvidia Corp. since its founding in 2022, says its AI search engine responds to queries with answers that are backed by citations from "trusted news outlets, academic papers and established blogs."
In April, attorneys at Latham & Watkins LLP advised Perplexity in a $62.7 million funding round that placed the value of the startup at more than $1 billion.
In the letter to Perplexity, shared with Law360 and first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, The Times says it is following up on the startup's correspondence with Diane Brayton, The Times' chief legal officer, about the allegedly "egregious and ongoing violation of The Times's intellectual property rights."
The Times says that while it has continuously registered its newspaper with the U.S. Copyright Office and has long engaged in licensing its copyrighted content for use by third parties, Perplexity has nonetheless copied The Times' protected works without permission.
Perplexity uses that content to create summaries and other output — a use that The Times views as "clearly substitutive of our protected works."
The cease-and-desist letter states that The Times has "taken proactive steps to cut off Perplexity's access to its website and prevent its unlawful copying, including disallowing your web crawler, PerplexityBot, in The Times' robots.txt file in February and hard-blocking the bot (i.e., preventing the Perplexity user agent from accessing our website) in April."
Perplexity is using The Times' content to add facts from external sources to generative AI models using a technique known as retrieval augmented generation, The Times said, a use that "violates The Times' exclusive rights of reproduction, display and distribution under copyright law, including by generating output that displays unauthorized copies and derivatives of The Times' journalism."
Attorneys for The Times are demanding that Perplexity disclose details about how, and how often, it has accessed The Times' content, and has given the startup until Oct. 30 to respond to its letter.
But Perplexity maintains that it's engaging in lawful behavior.
"We aren't scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question. The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts," Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick said in an emailed statement to Law360 on Tuesday.
The inability to copyright facts "is what allows us to have a rich and open information ecosystem" and allows news organizations to report on topics that have been covered by other news outlets, Platnick said. Perplexity also maintains that it no longer uses third-party crawlers that bypass robots.txt files.
Platnick said that The Times' cease-and-desist letter comes on the heels of similar letters sent to Perplexity by Forbes and Condé Nast, and that the company plans to timely respond to this letter as well. Platnick stressed that Perplexity deeply values journalism and has baked that principle into its revenue-sharing program with publishers.
Charlie Stadtlander, The Times' managing director of external communications, shared a copy of the cease-and-desist letter with Law360 but declined to comment on it.
--Editing by Karin Roberts.
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