CNN filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence-based search engine Perplexity in New York District Court for copyright infringement. The television network claims that the company copied and distributed more than 17 thousand news, images and visual content without permission.

Although CNN previously tried to make a licensing agreement with Perplexity, an agreement could not be reached between the parties. This development is the first legal lawsuit filed by CNN against an artificial intelligence company.

Copyright Discussions and Legal Process

Perplexity Liaison Manager Jesse Dwyer argued in his statement regarding the bet that facts cannot be protected by copyright. The US Copyright Office also states that copyrights do not protect facts, ideas or procedures, but they can protect the way they are expressed.

CNN, on the other hand, emphasizes that a company worth billions of dollars should not steal the labor of content producers and that commercial operators should pay to use this content. Associate Professor Michael Goodyear from New York Law School states that Perplexity’s argument that facts cannot be copyrighted is true, but the way the news is presented may be protected.

Goodyear says the course of the case depends on the question of whether Perplexity copied the contents verbatim or merely reported the facts. More than 100 copyrights have been filed against artificial intelligence companies so far.

License Agreements and Sectoral Crisis

A new report published by the Open Markets Institute shows that the rate of AI browsers bypassing paywalls has nearly quadrupled in the last six months, reaching 12.9 percent. This causes website traffic to decrease and publisher revenues to decrease.

Many publishers sign content licensing agreements with technology companies to compensate for lost advertising revenues. A way out for perplexity could be to sit down with CNN and make a licensing agreement.

However, the report points out that content producers are stuck between technology giants that both steal their traffic and control their license agreements.

Do you think it should be made mandatory for artificial intelligence companies to pay publishers for using news content?