Background
Nikkei Inc. and The Asahi Shimbun Company jointly filed suit in the Tokyo District Court against the U.S. firm Perplexity AI, Inc., alleging unauthorised reproduction and distribution of their news content. The plaintiffs claim that Perplexity’s systems copied and stored entire articles from their websites despite explicit robots.txt exclusions, republishing the material verbatim through its generative-search and answer-engine service. Each publisher seeks approximately ¥2.2 billion (≈ US $15 million) in damages and an injunction to prohibit further use of their works. The filings mark Japan’s first large-scale lawsuit by major news organisations against an AI company for content reuse.
AI interaction
The claim centres on Perplexity AI’s use of a large-language-model-based answer engine that summarises and presents copyrighted journalism. The plaintiffs allege that this process constitutes unlicensed reproduction and secondary use of protected works within the meaning of Japanese copyright law. The case highlights a growing international convergence of disputes over dataset scraping and AI-generated news aggregation, testing how national copyright regimes apply to generative-AI content delivery systems.
Note: The case remains in its early stage (filed August 2025) and no public ruling on liability is yet available. It joins a wave of litigation by publishers against AI platforms globally and may serve as a precedent for how Japanese courts treat AI-fuelled reuse of journalistic content.
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