The country’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, one of the world’s biggest by circulation, is suing US-based AI firm Perplexity for allegedly “free-riding” on its content on its search engine.
The lawsuit filed on Thursday is one of a slew by media companies worldwide against AI firms using their material and is the first by a major Japanese news organisation, Yomiuri said.
It accuses Perplexity of “free-riding on the results of the activities of news organisations, which have invested a great deal of effort and expense”.
A spokesman for the paper added that this “could have a negative impact on accurate journalism... and shake the foundations of democracy”.
The lawsuit filed in Tokyo seeks damages of ¥2.2bil (RM63mil), equivalent to 120,000 Yomuiri articles used “without permission” between February and June.
It is also seeking damages for lost advertising revenue, saying that Perplexity users click only on its search summaries and not on the newspaper’s website, reducing traffic.
The Yomiuri, with a daily circulation of around six million – down from over 10 million in 2010 – and some 2,500 reporters, is one of five major daily newspapers in Japan.
Perplexity was not immediately available for comment.
After a lawsuit by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in October, Perplexity criticised the “adversarial posture” of many media as “shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating”.
They “prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll,” it said.
“We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses.” — AFP
