CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing it of stealing the cable news outlet’s intellectual property.

The 54-page complaint was filed Thursday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and included 1,165 pages of exhibits of the copyrighted and trademarked content CNN says Perplexity has “unlawfully copied,” including “over 17,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other works to power its products and tools.”

As CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter pointed out in his report on the lawsuit, a growing list of publishers, media companies, and other content providers have sued AI companies for alleged copyright infringement, but this is the first such lawsuit filed by CNN and believed to be the first one filed by a television network.

News Corp (the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and book publisher Harper Collins, among others), The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Encyclopedia Britannica have all sued Perplexity. CNN’s complaint was accompanied by two “Statements of Relatedness” declaring its lawsuit “asserts copyright claims that overlap with the claims brought against the same Defendant” by the Times and Tribune, and that these “claims arise from substantially similar acts, including the Defendant’s unauthorized use of CNN’s content, including the articles and other content published on CNN’s Digital Platforms, to power Defendant’s generative artificial intelligence products and tools.”

“We expect that there will be substantial overlap between the legal and factual issues among the cases and designating these cases as related would avoid duplicative efforts, expenses and burdens on the Court,” the motions added, noting that the law firm representing CNN was also counsel for the plaintiffs in the Times and Tribune cases.

“The lawsuits are part of a larger effort to ensure that news providers are fairly compensated in a world where chatbots and other AI tools are funneling their news to consumers at scale,” wrote Stelter.

“You can’t copyright facts,” Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer argued in a statement to CNN.

A CNN spokesperson provided the following statement to Mediaite:

CNN actively embraces the opportunities AI creates. We have been engaged in the AI licensing marketplace for years, with multiple commercial partnerships, active agreements, and ongoing discussions with responsible industry players. CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits. The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it. We prefer that they do so through sensible licensing arrangements, but if they refuse to do that as Perplexity has so far refused to do, they will have to pay through legal damages. There is no free option.

CNN previously entered into a licensing agreement with Meta last December, reported Stelter.

A key issue raised in the complaint is that CNN tried to negotiate a content licensing deal with Perplexity last year, but the two sides did not reach an agreement.

“As a result, before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to access CNN’s content or to use its trademarks or service marks,” the complaint stated.

The complaint argued that Perplexity infringed on CNN’s copyrights “at two primary stages,” the input and output stage.

The infringement that occurred during the input stage, the complaint stated, happened when “Perplexity copies CNN’s content by crawling and scraping CNN’s Digital Platforms and other content with its own crawlers like PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, as well as those of third parties on which Perplexity relies,” and”by accessing and using third-party indices and databases comprised of scraped CNN content.”

Perplexity has also “intentionally ignored or evaded technical content protection measures, such as robots.txt, designed specifically to guard against such crawling and to instruct web crawlers to refrain from copying digital content,” on multiple occasions, the complaint said, and the company “openly admits that its Perplexity-User crawler ‘generally ignores robots.txt rules.'”

Investigations by other media outlets, including WIRED magazine, and independent investigators found evidence of Perplexity ignored the robots.txt file and evading firewalls, the complaint continued, and accused Perplexity of have “used, and continued to use similar undisclosed methods to access CNN’s content without permission.”

Regarding the output stage, the complaint pointed out that the “lengthy outputs from Perplexity’s GenAI Products often contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of CNN’s copyrighted content, particularly when a user asks a question about what CNN has reported,” or “are reworded into text that closely paraphrases or summarizes in detail CNN’s copyrighted works.”

This includes “provid[ing] information behind CNN’s paywall without paying for that content,” the complaint stated, and “[t]hese reproductions go far beyond the snippets typically shown with ordinary search results.”

The end result, the complaint argued, was that “users have less need to navigate to those [original] sources because their expressive content is already quoted or paraphrased in the narrative result.”

“In this way, Perplexity’s RAG outputs divert traffic and revenue away from copyright holders like CNN,” the complaint argued. “A user who has already read the latest news or found the right kind of product, even—or especially—with attribution to CNN, has little reason to visit the original source or pay to access the article they just read.”

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