Perplexity AI Says ‘You Can’t Copyright’ in Defense of CNN’s Copyright Suit

CNN is targeting artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity in a copyright infringement lawsuit. like Reported by the network’s Brian StetlerThe lawsuit, filed Thursday in New York District Court, accuses the artificial intelligence company of copying and distributing CNN content, including more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, photos and other published works.

Although this is CNN’s first legal case against an artificial intelligence company, the network joins other publishers who have sued the San Francisco-based startup, including The New York Times and News Corp. According to the lawsuit, CNN attempted to strike a licensing deal with Perplexity, but those talks did not result in an agreement. CNN previously struck a content licensing deal with Meta last year, in which the tech giant compensates the media company in exchange for using its reporting and content to respond to inquiries about Meta AI.

AI products regularly scrape news publications and websites to answer user questions with real-time data, accelerating the collapse of traffic and revenue back to the original sources.

In response to the lawsuit, Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, told Stetler and other media outlets in a statement: “You can’t copyright facts.” US government Copyright Office It states: “Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of action, although it may protect the manner in which these things are expressed.”

CNN said in its own statement that the tens of billions of dollars company should not “steal from the entities that create the original content that Perplexity exploits,” and that “commercial operators can and should pay to profit from it.”

A representative for Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amnesty International Copyright Claims

Perplexity is one of several companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, that have been fighting news publishers and media giants over copyright claims.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of CNET, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

More than 100 such lawsuits have been filed. But different conclusions have been reached about whether training AI models on copyrighted data constitutes fair use Michael Goodyear, associate professor at New York Law School. Considerations include how the training is conducted, what the AI ​​output contains and whether there is any competitive disadvantage to copyright holders.

“No appellate court has yet considered the merits of copyright infringement claims against AI companies,” Goodyear said.

In the CNN case, he said Perplexity is correct that the facts are not protected by copyright, but the way CNN presents the facts could be.

“Even short news articles usually qualify for copyright protection under the minimum originality requirement,” Goodyear said. “The question becomes whether the thousands of instances of violations described by CNN are literally copying entire paragraphs, or whether they are simply paraphrasing or copying unprotectable facts.”

Artificial intelligence licensing deals

As declining website traffic has sapped publishers’ revenues by the billions and caused widespread layoffs in media, AI companies are exacerbating the crisis. According to A A new report from the Open Markets Research InstituteOver the past six months, the rate of AI crawlers that bypass paywalls and blocks has nearly quadrupled, rising from 3.3% to 12.9%.

This is partly why a number of publishers have signed AI content licensing agreements with technology companies to monetize content used to train AI systems. One way out of the uncertainty might be to renegotiate the licensing deal with CNN. Even if Perplexity has valid legal arguments, the licensing agreement could turn from unauthorized extraction into an official content partnership.

However, the Open Markets Institute report says that when it comes to licensing AI content, news and content creators are caught in a double bind. The same tech giants whose AI tools starve websites of human traffic are now the ones guarding licensing deals aimed at replacing lost advertising revenue.