Japan’s leading newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, has filed a lawsuit against US-based AI company Perplexity, accusing it of “free-riding” on its content without authorization. Filed in a Tokyo court on Thursday, the lawsuit marks the first legal action of its kind by a major Japanese news outlet against an AI firm. Yomiuri claims Perplexity used around 120,000 of its articles without permission between February and June. The complaint states that Perplexity benefited from the “effort and expense” put into journalistic work and warns that such practices could undermine reliable journalism and threaten democratic values. Yomiuri is seeking 2.2 billion yen (around $14.7 million) in damages. 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.”
Major Japanese newspaper sues AI firm Perplexity over ‘free-riding’ content use
