Reddit’s copyright lawsuit against Perplexity AI avoids fair use debate

The social media platform Reddit is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to sue Perplexity AI, along with three web scraping companies, over how they obtained content created by its users to market their artificial intelligence products and development tools.

"The problem for Defendants,” according to the plaintiff’s Oct. 22 complaint, “is that Reddit is protected by technological-control barriers to prevent unscrupulous scrapers from accessing and stealing data directly from its website.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District...