New York Times Perplexity On December 6, 2024, The New York Times sued Perplexity AI for copyright infringement. The charge: stealing articles, videos, podcasts, and repackaging them as AI-generated answers. The Allegations The Times claims Perplexity: Scraped content without permission Generates "verbatim or near-verbatim" copies Bypassed technical barriers (robots.txt) Fabricated information and falsely attributed it to the Times Directly competes with and substitutes for NYT content The Business Model: "Skip the links" means skip the publishers entirely. The 18-Month Battle Multiple cease-and-desist letters sent (July 2024, October 2024) 18+ months of negotiations without a licensing deal Perplexity continued using content throughout Perplexity's Defense Head of Communications: "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it's never worked." Company Position: "Indexing web pages and surfacing factual content" "No one organization owns the copyright over facts" Offers Publishers' Program with revenue-sharing deals The Broader Attack Perplexity faces multiple lawsuits: Plaintiff / Date / Status Dow Jones (WSJ) / Oct 2024 / Active Chicago Tribune / Dec 2024 / Active Reddit / Oct 2024 / Active New York Times / Dec 2024 / Active Amazon also threatened legal action over Perplexity's shopping agent. What This Means This case tests: Whether AI must pay for content it summarizes How copyright applies to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) The future economic model for journalism If Publishers Win: AI companies must license content If AI Wins: Publishers lose a major revenue stream The Stark Reality Perplexity raised $1.5+ billion. They can afford licensing fees. They just don't want to pay.