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CNN Sues Perplexity Over Copyrighted News Content

By LDS Team · How we report||
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CNN Sues Perplexity Over Copyrighted News Content
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CNN filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Perplexity in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the AI company "unlawfully copying and distributing" CNN's reporting and using its marks without permission, according to CNN and reporting in Variety. The complaint, as reported by Variety, alleges Perplexity scraped more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos and videos and used them to train its products. Perplexity responded to media requests with the quoted line "You can't copyright facts," per TheWrap. CNN says it attempted licensing talks with Perplexity last year but did not reach terms, and the suit joins multiple publisher actions against Perplexity even as other outlets have negotiated licensing deals, reporting by CNN and other outlets states.

What happened

CNN filed a federal copyright and trademark suit against Perplexity in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the AI company unlawfully copied and distributed CNN content without permission, according to CNN's reporting and contemporaneous coverage by Variety and TheWrap.

Allegations in the complaint

Per the 54-page complaint described by Variety, CNN alleges Perplexity scraped more than 17,000 of the network's stories, photos, videos and other content and used that material in training or operating its services. CNN's public statement included the quote that Perplexity "should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits," as reported by CNN and echoed in aggregator coverage.

Perplexity's public response

In response to media inquiries, Perplexity's comment to TheWrap was published as "You can't copyright facts." Variety also reports the complaint points to Perplexity advertising that it helps users skip the "extra steps and clicks" normally needed to access full news articles.

Editorial analysis - technical context

Industry-pattern observations show the current legal debate centers on the boundary between uncopyrightable facts and copyrighted expressive content, and on whether large language models or retrieval layers reproduce protectable expression. For practitioners, that distinction affects dataset curation choices: whether to rely on licensed publisher feeds, focus on metadata and links, or implement redaction and copyright-safe filtering when ingesting news content.