Dow Jones and New York Post sue Perplexity for copyright infringement

News Corp titles Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post filed suit against Perplexity in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that its answer-engine product depended on “a massive amount of illegal copying” of their journalism.

The complaint alleged Perplexity had ingested the plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles into an internal database and used them to generate answers to user queries, in the process diverting readers and advertising revenue away from the original publishers. It followed a July 2024 letter in which Dow Jones and the Post had put Perplexity on notice and offered to discuss a licensing deal; the suit alleged that offer went nowhere. The plaintiffs sought an injunction against further unauthorised copying and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, plus actual damages and disgorgement of profits.

The case was one of several publisher suits filed against Perplexity and other AI companies over the same period, adding to a broader industry pattern in which some outlets pursued litigation while others — including several News Corp-adjacent and rival publishers — signed licensing deals with the same companies instead. Perplexity said it would defend itself, arguing its product functioned as a search and summarisation tool protected by established legal doctrine rather than as a substitute for the underlying journalism.