AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images, giving it permission to display Getty images across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable change for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Perplexity and Getty have been working together for more than a year, a person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Although it was never announced, Getty was participating in Perplexity’s Publishers Program and planned to share ad revenue with publishers when their content appeared in search queries, the people said.
Today’s agreement is a new agreement. Officials told TechCrunch that this is not a traditional block licensing deal because Perplexity does not train its own underlying models, but did not elaborate on the terms.
Perplexity’s agreement with Getty appears to legitimize some of the company’s previous uses of Getty’s stock photos. Perplexity came under fire last year for a series of plagiarism accusations from multiple news organizations. In one case, the startup was cited for extracting content from a Wall Street Journal article that included a photo of Getty.
At the time, some news outlets questioned whether Perplexity’s use of the images constituted copyright infringement. A source told TechCrunch last year that Perplexity was working on a deal with Getty, but could not confirm the deal despite multiple attempts to reach out to the stock image giant.
More recently, Reddit sued Perplexity in October, alleging “industrial scale and illegal” scraping of user content and circumvention of technological measures to access data. Reddit has a data licensing agreement with OpenAI.
Perplexity says its deal with Getty will improve the display of images and allow it to include a link to the original source in credit each time an image appears in search results.
Nick Unsworth, Getty’s vice president of strategic development, said the agreement “recognizes the importance of properly attributed consent and its value in powering AI-powered products.”
“Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in the age of AI,” Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “Together, we are helping people discover answers through powerful visual storytelling, while always knowing where their content comes from and who created it.”
Perplexity’s focus on attribution is part of its strategy to defend itself against copyright charges by arguing that since published facts are not copyrighted, use of publisher content (including content behind paywalls or where publishers have explicitly indicated they do not want scraping) constitutes “fair use.”
Source link
