Skip to content

Generated Source Mirror

This page is generated from the source Markdown file so it can be viewed inside the MkDocs site.

📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 3
  • Research debt items: 4

Dow Jones & Co. v. Perplexity AI, Inc.

Summary

Dow Jones & Company, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-07984 (S.D.N.Y.), is news-publisher copyright and trademark litigation over Perplexity’s generative “answer engine.” Dow Jones and NYP Holdings filed on October 21, 2024. On August 21, 2025, Judge Katherine Polk Failla denied Perplexity’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and improper venue, denied transfer to the Northern District of California, and allowed claims on ten works registered after the original complaint. The order is not a fair-use holding. A later Times action against Perplexity is pending in the same district.

Verified Facts

  • Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and NYP Holdings, Inc. filed a copyright complaint against Perplexity AI, Inc. on October 21, 2024, in the Southern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-07984.2
  • The operative second amended complaint, as described in the court’s August 21, 2025 opinion, alleges copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106 and false designation of origin and trademark dilution under 15 U.S.C. § 1125. Perplexity is described as a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Francisco that developed an “answer engine.”1
  • On August 21, 2025, the court denied in full Perplexity’s motion to dismiss under Rules 12(b)(2) and 12(b)(3), its alternative motion to transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), and its Rule 12(b)(6) challenge to ten additional works registered after the original complaint but before an amended complaint.1
  • The court held that plaintiffs had made a prima facie showing of specific personal jurisdiction under New York’s long-arm statute, including alleged New York office, employees, registration to do business, and marketing contacts, and that venue was therefore proper. It declined to transfer the case.1
  • The New York Times Company filed a separate copyright complaint against Perplexity AI, Inc. on December 5, 2025, No. 1:25-cv-10106 (S.D.N.Y.).3

Historical Context

This docket is the leading news-publisher case against a retrieval-augmented answer engine rather than a closed chatbot trained only on a static corpus. It is adjacent to Times v. OpenAI but names a different defendant and emphasizes real-time crawling plus generated answers.1

Jurisdiction: Southern District of New York. Authority level: personal-jurisdiction, venue, and § 411(a) pleading order. The court did not decide § 107 or substantial similarity on the merits.1

The practical result is that a California-headquartered AI company can be sued in New York on these allegations without a transfer. Output-substitution and RAG-copying theories remain for later stages. The Times Perplexity action is a separate case; this page records its filing, not its merits.

Relationships

  • CASE-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY cites SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-MTD-2025.
  • CASE-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY related_to CASE-NYT-V-OPENAI.
  • CASE-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.

Sources

  1. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-MTD-2025: Opinion denying motion to dismiss (Aug. 21, 2025).
  2. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-DOCKET: CourtListener docket for No. 1:24-cv-07984.
  3. SRC-NYT-V-PERPLEXITY-DOCKET: CourtListener docket for No. 1:25-cv-10106.

Research Debt

  • Add the second amended Dow Jones complaint as the operative pleading source.
  • Add the Times Perplexity complaint and any later MTD order from those PDFs.
  • Add Chicago Tribune Co. v. Perplexity, No. 1:25-cv-10094, from that complaint, not secondary summaries.
  • Do not treat RAG architecture descriptions in the opinion as proven copying.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2025-08-21
  • Last verified: 2026-09-02

  1. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-MTD-2025 — Opinion & Order (Aug. 21, 2025). Primary for claims, jurisdiction, venue, and the ten-works ruling. ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-DOCKET — CourtListener docket. Primary for original filing date. ↩

  3. SRC-NYT-V-PERPLEXITY-DOCKET — CourtListener docket for No. 1:25-cv-10106. Primary for Times filing date. ↩