Japan’s leading media outlets sue US AI company over copyright

By Saadet Gokce

ISTANBUL (AA) - Two of Japan's leading media outlets, Nikkei Inc. and The Asahi Shimbun Company, on Tuesday started legal procedures against the US Artificial Intelligence company Perplexity AI over copyright infringement allegations.

The media companies are accusing Perplexity’s search engine service of utilizing their copyrighted articles without permission, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

Both companies are seeking an injunction to halt the reproduction of their articles and to have the existing content deleted, along with 2.2 billion yen ($14.9 million) in damages for each company.

Earlier this month, another Japanese media outlet, The Yomiuri Shimbun, became the first major news organization in Japan to initiate such a such a lawsuit.

Perplexity uses generative AI in its search engine to answer questions by extracting and summarizing relevant information from a wide range of sources.

Asahi and Nikkei, on the lawsuit, claimed that Perplexity copies articles from their servers, stores them on its own servers when generating responses, and uses the content without authorization.

The companies also pointed out that some of the answers the search engine produced, while citing them as sources, contained false information that differed from the original source articles.