The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses these companies of unfair competition and unjust enrichment while also alleging that some violated US copyright laws.
Reddit said in the complaint that the “data-scraping companies circumvented its data protection measures to steal data that Perplexity desperately needs to power its answer engine system.”
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content, and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement.
Lee added, “scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data and sell it to clients looking for training material.”
He added that “Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.”
“Reddit hosts over 100,000 interest-based subreddit communities,” said in its lawsuit that its “user posts had become the most commonly cited source for AI-generated answers on Perplexity.”
It added that it sent Perplexity a ‘cease-and-desist’ letter, after which it increased the volume of citations to Reddit “forty-fold.”
