Perplexity faces a joint copyright lawsuit filed in Tokyo by Nikkei and Asahi alleging that the search firm unlawfully scraped and repeatedly served their articles in response to user queries. The plaintiffs claim Perplexity ignored robots.txt files and reproduced publisher content, seeking injunctions and ¥2.2 billion in damages per firm. Similar claims by Yomiuri and cease-and-desist letters from other outlets indicate broader industry conflict. Japanese law permits training on copyrighted material but prohibits full reproduction and interference with distribution. The filings also allege violation of exclusive adaptation rights and accuse Perplexity of attributing incorrect information to the outlets.
Nikkei and Asahi filed their joint suit on Tuesday in Tokyo District Court, claiming that the Google challenger unlawfully scraped their articles and repeatedly served up the content in response to user queries. They allege Perplexity ignored their robots.txt files to do so, echoing accusations leveled against the company earlier this month by Cloudflare. On that occasion, Perplexity insisted that overriding such crawler-blocking preferences was acceptable as long as the user is directing the search query that triggers the information retrieval.
Japanese copyright law doesn't stop AI companies from freely training their models on copyrighted material, but it draws the line at wholly reproducing that content and interfering with the publishers' right of distribution, both of which are central claims in the Yomiuri and Nikkei/Asahi suits. The newest filing also alleges that Perplexity violated the media companies' exclusive right to adapt their own content.
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