Logo of US start-up Perplexity (©Reuters/Kyodo)
On December 1, The Sankei Shimbun issued a formal protest against the United States startup Perplexity, demanding an immediate halt to copyright infringement.
The complaint specifically targets unauthorized use of the newspaper's articles in a generative artificial intelligence (AI) search service.
On the same day, Mainichi Shimbun and Kyodo News submitted separate complaints with Perplexity over similar rights violations. The three companies also issued a joint statement.
Sankei said it would handle the matter firmly, with legal action also under consideration.
Free Ride Accusations
Perplexity was founded in 2022 by former employees of OpenAI, the American company behind ChatGPT.
The startup provides a service that uses search engines and generative AI to collect information from the internet and respond to user queries.
In its complaint, Sankei stated that Perplexity was taking articles from its news sites, Sankei News and Sankei Sports, without permission, and using them to produce responses for users.
The newspaper accused the startup of "free riding" on content created with considerable effort and expense, thereby violating reproduction and public transmission rights under the Copyright Act.
Moreover, the complaint alleges that by presenting false content while citing Sankei as its source, the service significantly undermined the newspaper's credibility.
Perplexity Faces Global Legal Actions
In a joint statement, the three newspapers stated: "We feel a sense of crisis that accurate and reliable reporting, which underpins the very foundations of democracy, will be destroyed unless rampant copyright infringement and other illegal activities are stopped."
Regarding Perplexity, the Tokyo, Osaka, and Western regional offices of the Yomiuri Shimbun filed a lawsuit in August seeking damages and other remedies. The Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei Shimbun have also filed similar lawsuits.
In the US, Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets have similarly brought legal action alleging copyright infringement.
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Author: The Sankei Shimbun
(Read this in Japanese)
