Perplexity AI Says 'You Can't Copyright Facts' In Defense Against CNN Copyright Suit
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/perplexity-ai-cnn-copyright-suit/
The AI search company Perplexity is being sued by CNN and other media companies for copyright infringement.
AI products regularly scrape news publications and websites to answer user questions with real-time data, accelerating the collapse in traffic and revenue to original sources.
In response to the lawsuit, Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's chief communications officer, told Stetler and other media outlets in a statement: "You can't copyright facts." The US government's Copyright Office states: "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed."
CNN said in its own statement that a company valued at tens of billions of dollars shouldn't "steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits" and that "commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it."
A Perplexity representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Perplexity is one of several companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, that have been battling news publishers and media giants over copyright claims.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
More than 100 such lawsuits have been filed. But different conclusions have been reached as to whether training AI models on copyrighted data counts as fair use, saidMichael Goodyear, an associate professor at New York Law School. Considerations include how the training occurs, what AI outputs contain and whether there's any competitive harm to copyright holders.
"No appellate courts have yet weighed in on the viability of these copyright infringement claims against AI companies," Goodyear said.
In the CNN case, he said that Perplexity is correct that facts aren't protected by copyright, but the way CNN presents facts could be.
"Even short news articles would typically qualify for copyright protection under the low bar of required originality," Goodyear said. "The question becomes whether the thousands of cases of infringement CNN describes are copying whole paragraphs verbatim, or whether they are paraphrasing or merely copying unprotectable facts."
As plunging website traffic has drained billions in publisher revenue and triggered widespread media layoffs, AI firms are aggravating the crisis. According to anew report from the think tank Open Markets Institute, over the past six months, the rate of AI crawlers bypassing paywalls and blocks has nearly quadrupled, spiking from 3.3% to 12.9%.
That's partly why a number of publishers signed AI content licensing deals with tech companies to monetize content used to train AI systems. One way out for Perplexity may be to renegotiate a licensing deal with CNN. Even if Perplexity has valid legal arguments, a licensing agreement could shift from unauthorized scraping toward a formalized content partnership.
However, the Open Markets Institute report says that when it comes to AI content licensing, news and content creators are trapped in a double bind. The same tech giants whose AI tools are starving websites of human traffic are now the ones gatekeeping the licensing deals meant to replace that lost ad revenue.
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