News Corp’s copyright action against Perplexity may prove defining, with the AI bot needing to lift its game if it wants to avoid problems with copyright holders in the future.

News has already come to terms with ChatGPT developer OpenAI, praised as a “principled” company by News chief executive Robert Thomson, along with others that have signed up to use the publisher’s content for training AI. But he says Perplexity – which he says, “proudly states that users can ‘skip the links’” – has not responded to its “woo rather than sue” invitations, so News is suing, citing among other things, Perplexity’s alleged practice of “reproducing content verbatim”.

And here may be its problem: News is invoking its rights under copyright laws which – in the US as in Australia – protect “original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software and architecture”.

A note from the US Copyright Office makes the point that copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, “although it may protect the way these things are expressed”. Copyright is in the arrangement of words.

Or as stand-up comics have been telling us for years, it’s the way you tell ’em.

Like every other publisher invested in the skills of journalism and news gathering, News has a lot at stake, and is challenging what Thomson describes as the content kleptocracy, “for the sake of our journalists, our writers, and our company”.

The word, incidentally, is usually used in the context of governments, where it refers (and I quote Chatham House) to “a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ‘near-total impunity for those authorised to loot by the thief-in-chief’ – namely the head of state”.

News accuses Perplexity of infringing upon copyrighted content by copying news articles, analyses, and opinions “on a massive scale”. It’s part of News claim that Perplexity has also occasionally misattributed facts and analyses, occasionally citing incorrect sources “and, at times, fabricating news stories altogether”. News wants the court to tell Perplexity to cease using its content without permission and to destroy any databases containing its works. Other publishers including Wired and Forbes are also reported to have accused Perplexity of copyright infringements, and the New York Times is currently suing OpenAI.

For its part, this month Perplexity announced that FactSet, Crunchbase, Kruze, Stripe, Opal and Inteleos were joining a partner programme that would allow it to “leverage their domain knowledge”, allowing them to make it available in the AWS marketplace

The News case will be a defining one for the news industry, as one suspects it’s not the analysis and opinion Perplexity and its users are interested in, but the concise summaries its technology may be able to deliver. Do that in your own words, and you might appear to have a defence to a copyright suit.

There’s another factor, however. News is a large corporation with deep pockets; Perplexity is a start-up dependant upon the funding of investors. A long and messy copyright action might be the death of it.

Now there’s a thought.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: How Perplexity made its latest announcement