• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 6 hours ago

OpenAI has drawn the bulk of the negative attention over its alleged scraping of news content.  

Now the search firm Perplexity is coming in for an additional share. The BBC has threatened the firm with a lawsuit for its purported use of content “verbatim” without permission or compensation. 

"This constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC's terms of use," the BBC said in a letter to a letter to Perplexity's boss Aravind Srinivas, the BBC reports.  

Furthermore, this usage fails to meet BBC Editorial Guidelines concerning impartial and accurate news, the BBC stated.

"It is therefore highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC's reputation with audiences -- including UK license fee payers who fund the BBC -- and undermining their trust in the BBC," it added.

BBC demands that Perplexity stop using BBC content, delete any it holds, and pay for what it has used, the BBC reports. 

Don’t expect Perplexity to roll over. "The BBC's claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly," it says in a statement. 

Perplexity also points out that it is not using content to build large language models. It also denies that it is not respecting robots.txt. instructions.  

Of course, BBC is not the first media company to challenge Perplexity. Dow Jones sued the firm last year, saying in an amended complaint, “This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”

Perplexity has filed a motion to dismiss the case. 

It is not clear whether the BBC would sue in the U.K. or the U.S. But one thing is certain: The struggle between technology companies and beleaguered news organizations will not soon be over.