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Reddit is suing Perplexity and three “data mining service providers” to “stop industrial-scale illegal circumvention of data protection by a group of bad actors who will stop at nothing to obtain valuable copyrighted content on Reddit.” According to the complaint.
The company equates the data mining companies – SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy – to “would-be bank robbers” who “know they can’t get into the bank vault, and break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead.” Reddit claims Perplexity is a customer of “at least one” of the data mining companies, saying it “will do seemingly anything to get the Reddit data it desperately needs to fuel its ‘answer engine’ — that is, anything.” Other than Entering into an agreement with Reddit directly, as some of its competitors have done.
According to the lawsuit, Reddit sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity in May 2024 “demanding that it stop deleting Reddit data.” While Perplexity told Reddit at the time that it did not use Reddit content to train AI models and that it would respect Reddit’s robots.txt file, after that message, the volume of Reddit citations on Perplexity actually increased. Reddit also created a post that could only be crawled by Google, and within hours, Perplexity produced the contents of that post, the company says.
“The only way Perplexity could have obtained this Reddit content and then used it in its Answer Engine is if it and/or its co-defendants scraped the Google SERPs for the Reddit content and then Perplexity quickly incorporated that data into its Answer Engine,” Reddit writes.
“AI companies are in an arms race for high-quality human content — and this pressure has fueled a ‘data laundering’ economy on an industrial scale,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, says in a statement. “Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to customers hungry for training materials. Reddit is a prime target because it is one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.
“Defendants Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpAI — a Lithuanian data mining company, a former Russian botnet, and a company that publicly advertises suspicious circumvention methods — are typical examples of this illegal behavior,” Lee says. “Unable to scrape Reddit directly, they hide their identities, hide their locations, and hide their web scraping tools to steal Reddit content from Google search. Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these data scraping tools, choosing to purchase the stolen data rather than enter into a legal agreement with Reddit itself.”
“Perplexity has not yet received the lawsuit, but we will always fight hard for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge,” says Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. Edge. “Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers using precise AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.”