Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity for copyright infringement

Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group — the Alden Global Capital-owned groups that publish the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other US local papers — sued Perplexity for copyright infringement, one day before the New York Times filed a similar suit.

The complaint alleged that Perplexity’s AI search product scraped and reproduced Tribune-owned articles despite opt-out mechanisms and robots.txt directives intended to block such scraping, and that this undercut the papers’ traffic and advertising revenue. It sought an injunction against further use of the papers’ content and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, alongside unspecified damages for lost revenue from diminished web traffic.

The filing extended Alden’s earlier copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft — brought by a coalition of 17 of its papers — to a second AI company, and joined a broader run of publisher litigation against Perplexity that by early December also included News Corp titles, Encyclopedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun and Reddit.