Reddit, a social media platform, has also sued Perplexity AI and three data scraping companies, claiming that they illegally used user posted content on Reddit to train the answer engine of the AI company.
In a court filing in New York, the defendants, including Oxylabs UAB (Lithuania), AWMProxy (previously Russian-based), and SerpApi (Texas), stated that it was an industrial level scraping of public posts and comments on Reddit and selling or delivering that data to Perplexity AI.
Reddit alleges that Perplexity had circumvented protective measures and declined to make a licensing deal, unlike other large AI companies, which have engaged directly with Reddit.
Why this case is significant
Reddit argues that its enormous repository of human created conversations is an asset in itself that may be licensed in the market.
The action of not contracting results in the lawsuit arguing that the defendants were denying Reddit the opportunity of revenue and eroding protection of the rights of data.
The complaint alleges that although Perplexity was served with a cease and desist letter in May 2024, the number of times it cited Reddit material grew forty times.
Perplexity has reacted by disowning the claims, stating that its service summarizes the content of the people, and it acknowledges open access.
Nevertheless, Reddit claims that the trend of scraping demonstrates the avoidance of legal licensing.
Consequences of AI and content platforms
This is a case that signifies a more significant dispute between artificial intelligence firms and sites where users upload content.
With AIs using additional information to get better, tools such as Reddit also want to defend the utilization and monetization of the content they do.
Its result can influence the ways of organizing future AI training contracts and the protection of rights of user content platforms.
Analysts note that the business model of Perplexity creating answers based on the online content is complicated further, as the limits of scraping and licensing are put into question.
The move by Reddit indicates that sites are ready to sue to protect the terms of data usage.
What to watch
- The commercial situation of the legal definition of data scraping and public content aggregation.
- When Perplexity will either license or challenge the claims in court.
- The monetary considerations: Reddit is pursuing undetermined damages and an injunction to prevent the unlawful use of the material.
- The more significant effect: Other platforms can also adopt the example of Reddit and implement more rigorous regulations or licensing models on AI training data.
Also read : Reddit Outage Hits US Users: App and Website Down
