BBC Threatens Legal Action Against Perplexity AI Over Content Scraping

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation's first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology. The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity's model was 'trained using BBC content.' The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, threatens an injunction against Perplexity unless it stops scraping all BBC content to train its AI models, and deletes any copies of the broadcaster's material it holds unless it provides 'a proposal for financial compensation.'

The legal threat comes weeks after Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and the boss of Sky both criticised proposals being considered by the government that could let tech companies use copyright-protected work without permission. 'If we currently drift in the way we are doing now we will be in crisis,' Davie said, speaking at the Enders conference. 'We need to make quick decisions now around areas like... protection of IP. We need to protect our national intellectual property, that is where the value is. What do I need? IP protection; come on, let's get on with it.' 'Perplexity's tool [which allows users to choose between different AI models] directly competes with the BBC's own services, circumventing the need for users to access those services,' the corporation said.

Perplexity told the FT that the BBC's claims were 'manipulative and opportunistic' and that it had a 'fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.