Perplexity Strikes Multi-year Licensing Deal With Getty Images 

AI hunt startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing woody pinch Getty Images, which gives it support to show images from Getty crossed its AI-powered hunt and find tools. The woody marks a notable displacement for nan company, which has been deed by allegations of contented scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to found much general contented partnerships. 

Perplexity and Getty person been moving together for much than a year, a root acquainted pinch nan woody told TechCrunch. Though it was ne'er announced, Getty was portion of Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, a scheme to stock advertisement gross pinch publishers erstwhile their contented surfaced successful a hunt query, nan root said.  

Today’s statement is simply a caller deal. A root told TechCrunch it’s not a accepted lump sum licensing deal, since Perplexity doesn’t train its ain foundational models, but would not elaborate connected nan terms.

Perplexity’s statement pinch Getty appears to legitimize immoderate of nan startup’s erstwhile usage of Getty’s banal photos. Perplexity came nether occurrence past twelvemonth for a series of plagiarism accusations from several news organizations. In 1 case, nan startup was called retired for pulling contented from a Wall Street Journal article, including nan Getty photograph in that piece.  

At nan time, respective outlets questioned whether Perplexity’s usage of nan images constituted copyright infringement. A root past twelvemonth told TechCrunch that Perplexity was moving connected an statement pinch Getty, but we were incapable to corroborate nan woody aft reaching retired to banal image elephantine respective times.  

More recently, Reddit sued Perplexity successful October, alleging “industrial-scale, unlawful” scraping of personification contented and circumventing method measures to entree data. Reddit has a data licensing statement pinch OpenAI. 

Perplexity says its Getty woody will thief it amended show images and see credits pinch links backmost to nan original root whenever images show up successful hunt results. 

Nick Unsworth, vice president of strategical improvement astatine Getty, said nan statement “acknowledges nan value of decently attributed consent and its worth successful enhancing AI-powered products.” 

“Attribution and accuracy are basal to really group should understand nan world successful an property of AI,” Jessica Chan, caput of contented and patient partnerships astatine Perplexity, said successful a statement. “Together, we’re helping group observe answers done powerful ocular storytelling while ensuring they ever cognize wherever that contented comes from and who created it.” 

Perplexity’s accent connected attribution is portion of its strategy of defending against copyright accusations by arguing its usage of patient contented – including contented down a paywall aliases that publishers person explicitly indicated they don’t want scraped – constitutes “fair use” because publically disposable facts are not copyrightable.