Comment by nradov
2 days ago
Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
2 days ago
Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
> Perplexity is still a small startup.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai
I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo
Is that small?
It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc.
It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
I’m not talking about Japan. In the US, seeding a torrent containing copyrighted material without authorization from the copyright holder is unambiguously a copyright violation.
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