Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue AI Search Perplexity Over Copied Definitions
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam‑Webster sued AI search company Perplexity in New York federal court, accusing it of scraping sites, stealing traffic, and copying copyrighted definitions verbatim — even tagging the brands to hallucinated or incomplete answers. The complaint includes side‑by‑side screenshots of identical Merriam‑Webster text. Perplexity, accused of “stealth crawling,” has faced similar disputes with major publishers.