Japan’s Nikkei, Asahi Sue Perplexity AI For Nearly $15M Over Copyright Breach

Nikkei, Inc., the publisher of Japan's largest business newspaper and owner of the UK's Financial Times, said on Tuesday it has sued Perplexity AI in a Tokyo court and sought damages of 2.2 billion yen ($14.97 million) for copying and distributing its content without permission.

The Asahi Shimbun Co., one of the oldest general news newspapers in the country, filed an identical suit on Tuesday, following a similar move by Japan's largest newspaper by circulation, the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Complaints by Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, which also seek an injunction, state that Perplexity bypassed technical safeguards against content use and accessed their servers to gather articles.

The AI company then created and disseminated summaries in breach of Japan's Copyright Act, and hurt the companies' commercial interests. In some cases, Perplexity's summarized articles were inaccurate, damaging the credibility of the publishers.

Claims for copyright infringement are not new for Perplexity and the industry leader, OpenAI. In the home market, Perlexity is arguing its case in a lawsuit brought against it by Dow Jones, a financial news powerhouse, while The New York Times has sued the operator of ChatGPT.

To mitigate, Perplexity has reportedly offered to share its revenue with some publishers, according to a Bloomberg report on Monday. Meanwhile, OpenAI has struck multi-year content licensing and technology subscription agreements with a variety of publishers, including the Associated Press, and news media groups such as News Corp, which owns Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Germany's Axel Springer.

Perplexity is not publicly listed. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around the company was in the ‘bearish’ territory at the time of writing.

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