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Title: BBC Threatens Legal Action Against Perplexity AI Over Content Scraping

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/20/2022...

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.

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