"Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an "industrial-scale, unlawful" economy to "scrape" the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain. Reddit's lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and "answer engine" that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search."
"Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a "former Russian botnet," and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website. "Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it's one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created," said Ben Lee, Reddit's chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday."
Reddit filed a federal lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI, Oxylabs UAB, the AWMProxy domain, and SerpApi of participating in an industrial-scale operation to scrape millions of Reddit comments for commercial use. The complaint alleges unfair competition, unjust enrichment and potential U.S. copyright violations tied to data harvesting used to train AI systems. Reddit asserts that scrapers circumvent technological protections to collect conversational content as training material. The suit distinguishes this case by targeting infrastructure providers that supply scraped web writings to AI developers. Perplexity and SerpApi have signaled intentions to defend their practices and to defend public access to information.
Read at The Mercury News
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