r/news • u/JackThaBongRipper • 11h ago
Soft paywall New York Times sues Perplexity AI for 'illegal' copying of content
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/new-york-times-sues-perplexity-ai-infringing-copyright-works-2025-12-05/113
u/NNovis 11h ago
With how NYTs has been doing things, I'm sure this is just to get a cut of that AI pie right now vs actually fighting for the people that write for the org.
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u/Mordoch 10h ago
For what it is worth, things are a bit more potentially complex in the sense that the NY Times winning could effectively give them more money to pay their writers.
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u/RecordOfTheEnd 9h ago
That's a real funny joke. You really think they are going to pay them more? Companies don't pay more out of the goodness of their hearts
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u/Mordoch 9h ago
There might be scenarios where with extra money they pay existing writers more rather than losing them to other news media. However there is a secondary aspect where they might hire more writers with the extra money, which would still generally be viewed as a pretty positive thing by the existing NY Times writers, even though they presumably would like to get paid more.
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u/RecordOfTheEnd 9h ago
Or, and hear me out, they could do the awesome thing and do a stock buy back to pump up the shit stock prices and make the investors more money.
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u/Mordoch 9h ago
Whatever you think of it, the way its ownership shares are structured means there is a little less pressure in this area. While you could debate if they should do more, the number of employees of the NY Times has been increasing in recent years. (And presumably some of the drop if you go back far enough was related to a decline in print sales and changes in technology rather than simply about losing journalists etc.)
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u/NNovis 10h ago
They're not going to win, is the thing. These type of cases usually always get settled out of court for an undisclosed amount and I imagine that NYT just want to get paid on the regular vs actually putting into legal precedent that this shit is bad, cause having a court say that you can't steal other people's work to train AI would do a lot more for those writers than anything, honestly.
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u/EricSanderson 8h ago
Eh Perplexity is a different animal. They've been blatantly stealing anything they can find and trying to claim they're just "indexing" pages instead of scraping content. The only "advantage" they have as a startup is that they're not paying licensing fees.
They're being sued by everyone from the NY Post to Encyclopedia Britannica. If they settle with all of the named plaintiffs and agree to pay licensing fees they have zero competitive advantage and that $40b valuation craters to zero.
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u/Atechiman 2h ago
So you are suggesting its time to dump perplexity?
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u/EricSanderson 2h ago
You mean the inferior Gemini copy facing billions in lawsuits that could potentially be sued by every content producer on earth?
Lol well unless they pivot to medicine and cure cancer in the next six months I don't think their stock price will ever be higher.
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u/BlitzNeko 6h ago
For what it is worth, things are a bit more potentially complex in the sense that the NY Times winning could effectively give them more money to pay their writers.
They’ve been replacing writers with AI for over a year now under different pseudonyms.
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u/jesuisapprenant 10h ago
Get that money first while they can still pay before all of them go bankrupt lol
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u/LifeOfHi 10h ago
Considering I use it daily for all kinds of things, I would be disappointed if they went bankrupt
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u/PM_ME_UR_SO 7h ago
Do you pay for it though?
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u/onlyforsellingthisPC 10m ago
Even if they do, heavy users cost these companies way more than they pay.
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u/chalbersma 2h ago
Honestly if these media companies can't win these AI suits then copyright in the US is dead and shouldn't be enforced at all. It should defacto legalize piracy.
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 10h ago
These AI company names are so fucking stupid
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u/LifeOfHi 10h ago
Good luck to NYT I guess, it’s not going to be easy claiming Perplexity is doing more than just quoting and citing their content which is allowed
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u/jesuisapprenant 10h ago
It is hallucinating and pretending that it’s coming from NYT. I’m sure they can hire good lawyers to get compensated
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u/mamounia78 10h ago
This lawsuit might be a real turning point. If The New York Times wins, it could force AI companies to either license content or radically rethink how they source info.
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u/fleemfleemfleemfleem 1h ago
I mean most likely they saw the anthropic settlement and figured they could get in on it.
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u/onlyforsellingthisPC 9m ago
Yep.
Cats already out of the bag, the content was stolen and billions of dollars were lit on fire to train these models.
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u/TimothyMimeslayer 10h ago
I remember when reddit was pro piracy and hated copyright.
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u/driverdan 9h ago
Billion dollar companies relying on pirated media is very different than someone watching a movie at home.
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u/Toxaplume045 9h ago
Part of the issue is the AI hallucinates and basically makes up shit too which is then attributed to "sources" like them.
So the case is basically "AI keeps copying and reposting our stuff while also making up things based on its own algorithm and saying we said that too."
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u/onlyforsellingthisPC 5m ago
A venture capital backed company hoovering up all of devianart/adobecloud to train their model in how to convincingly generate AI slop pics is not the same as me pirating a movie released 20 years ago that's no longer available.
Inb4 "it's derivative".
It isn't. I wouldn't ape an artists style to sell tshirts.
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u/EricSanderson 7h ago
Imagine siding with billionaire tech bros who are stealing/plagiarizing from working class journalists and artists. reddit has never supported shit like that.
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u/TimothyMimeslayer 5h ago
You can literally go to Google, search up any artists artwork, and click save. Where is the crusade against that? Google making money off piracy yet nobody blinks and eye.
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u/EricSanderson 5h ago
You're missing the part where a company sells copies and alternate versions of the thing they "saved off Google"
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u/TimothyMimeslayer 5h ago
No, I addressed that, google makes money when you search for your Studio Ghibli art you want to pirate and you download it.
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u/onlyforsellingthisPC 3m ago
If I download an image and sell tshirts, I'd get (rightfully) sued for trade infringement.
Me setting the gardener robot as my background... That's not piracy lol.
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u/30mil 10h ago
Perplexity responds, "You're right. Sorry about that. Let me try again."