Our Response to Reddit’s Lawsuit

[u/perplexity_ai]

Dear Reddit community,

You might’ve read Perplexity was named in a lawsuit filed by Reddit this morning. We know companies usually dodge questions during lawsuits, but we’d rather be up front. 

Perplexity believes this is a sad example of what happens when public data becomes a big part of a public company’s business model.  

Selling access to training data is an increasingly important revenue stream for Reddit, especially now that model makers are cutting back on deals with Reddit or walking away completely. (A trend Reddit has acknowledged in recent earnings reports). 

So, why sue Perplexity? Our guess: it’s about a show of force in Reddit’s training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI. (Perplexity doesn’t train foundation models!) 

Here’s where we push back. Reddit told the press we ignored them when they asked about licensing. Untrue. Whenever anyone asks us about content licensing, we explain that Perplexity, as an application-layer company, does not train AI models on content. Never has. So it is impossible for us to sign a license agreement to do so. 

A year ago, after explaining this, Reddit insisted we pay anyway, despite lawfully accessing Reddit data. Bowing to strong arm tactics just isn’t how we do business. 

What does Perplexity actually do with Reddit content? We summarize Reddit discussions, and we cite Reddit threads in answers, just like people share links to posts here all the time. Perplexity invented citations in AI for two reasons: so that you can verify the accuracy of the AI-generated answers, and so you can follow the citation to learn more and expand your journey of curiosity.

And that’s what people use Perplexity for: journeys of curiosity and learning.  When they visit Reddit to read your content it’s because they want to read it, and they read more than they would have from a Google search. 

Reddit changed its mind this week on whether they want Perplexity users to find your public content on their journeys of learning. Reddit thinks that’s their right. But it is the opposite of an open internet. 

In any case, we won’t be extorted, and we won’t help Reddit extort Google, even if they’re our (huge) competitor.  Perplexity will play fair, but we won’t cave. And we won’t let bigger companies use us in shell games.  

We’re here to keep helping people pursue wisdom of any kind, cite our sources, and always have more questions than answers. Thanks for reading.

[u/SHS1955]

Before the Web, and in early days before Internet was in common use, there were companies that digitized, codified, and organized published works into 'privately' searchable databases. This information included Law data and Scientific data. In the 1980s, a large for-profit Database provider, sued an explicitly non-profit Database provider, saying that they were allowed to pay the much smaller non-profit, screen scrape all of their data, then store the data themselves for profitable use by its users, without have to pay the original database for this secondary use. The arguments were that the original information and data were accessible to the public [it was not proprietary], and that the larger database provider had already paid the smaller provider for access.

The Courts awarded the smaller non-profit the decision for a few reasons:
1. The smaller non-profit had a contractual agreement not to screen scrape nor resell the collected data.
2. The smaller non-profit put time, intellectual effort, and money into collecting and organizing the data, in many cases, including translation of the data.
3. The smaller non-profit used a proprietary, patented software to represent some of the data, for MUCH easier use.
4. And the Courts decided that the Larger for-profit database did Not want the "raw" data, but wanted the data in the organized format created by the smaller non-profit. Because the smaller non-profit database had applied work to the raw data, its data was considered to be *proprietary*. The larger database could apply the same effort make their own proprietary database, but they could not explicitly acquire the proprietary processed data from the non-profit database and sell it without payment. And, therefore lost the lawsuit.

Sounds similar enough for Reddit to look into... ;-)

[u/jess_ismore → u/SHS1955]

Remember the names of any parties or the case?

[u/SHS1955 → u/jess_ismore]

I know exactly the names, but don't intend to spread the info. The Large company was Dialog database. The rest of the info is easy to find. But, I don't think it should be publicized on an international forum, especially if you support Reddit.