CNN Sues Perplexity, Alleging AI Company Infringed Its Copyrights

Key Points:

• CNN has filed a lawsuit against AI company Perplexity in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing it of copyright and trademark infringement by scraping over 17,000 CNN stories, photos, and videos without consent to train its AI products.
• This is CNN's first legal action against an AI company to protect its copyrights, with other news organizations like the New York Times and Dow Jones having filed similar lawsuits against Perplexity, while some publishers like Time and USA Today have reached licensing agreements.
• CNN alleges Perplexity falsely advertised access to CNN's premium content through its "Comet Plus" tier despite no existing partnership, causing trademark infringement and consumer confusion.
• The network emphasized the importance of licensing deals for commercial use of original journalism and criticized Perplexity for refusing to negotiate terms, leading to legal action after blocking Perplexity’s scraping bot.
• Perplexity responded by asserting that "facts" cannot be copyrighted, while Dow Jones described such lawsuits as adversarial and counterproductive for media-tech relations.