Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. and Merriam-Webster Inc. sued Perplexity AI Inc. Wednesday, accusing the AI company of powering its search engine with “massive copying” of their protected content without permission.
Perplexity takes ”free rides” on the companies’ investment to develop high-quality content by using a bot to crawl and scrape research websites. The AI firm’s practice is “cannibalizing traffic” otherwise landing directly on the companies’ pages, according to a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Britannica and Merriam-Webster rely on those now-diverted clicks for revenue including to sell subscriptions and advertising, the complaint ...
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