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Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. sued Perplexity AI, Inc. on September 10, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Their complaint alleges that Perplexity copied and reproduced reference content, used the publishers’ trademarks in misleading ways, attached inaccurate AI-generated answers to those brands, and diverted users from the publishers’ websites. Those are allegations, not court findings.
As of August 16, 2026, the case remained in motion practice and discovery. The public docket showed no final merits judgment. A jury trial was scheduled, but the dates and even the trial plan can change.
Who sued whom?
The plaintiffs are Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. Britannica’s corporate group publishes Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster products and operates reference, education, subscription and advertising businesses. The defendant is Perplexity AI, Inc., which operates an answer-oriented search service.
The action is Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., civil action 1:25-cv-07546 (also listed as 25 Civ. 7546 (JLR) (SLC)), before Judge Jennifer L. Rochon, with discovery matters handled by Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave. The docket lists copyright as the nature of suit and records a jury demand. The complaint is available at this PDF; the public docket is at Justia.
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What Britannica and Merriam-Webster allege
Copyright claims
According to the complaint, Perplexity obtained or copied protected reference material, reproduced some of it verbatim or nearly verbatim in generated answers, and did so without authorization or a licensing agreement. The plaintiffs contend that individual acts of copying or reproduction implicate the exclusive rights in the Copyright Act.
The complaint also frames Perplexity’s answer format as commercially substituting for the original pages: users may receive the informational value inside Perplexity instead of visiting Britannica or Merriam-Webster. The plaintiffs say Perplexity therefore benefits from editorial work and investment while weakening page views, subscriptions, advertising opportunities and direct brand engagement. The complaint does not, by itself, establish a quantified amount of lost traffic or revenue.
Trademark, false-association and brand-harm claims
The trademark theories concern more than the appearance of a familiar word in a search result. The plaintiffs allege that Perplexity displayed Britannica and Merriam-Webster names or marks in ways that could suggest sponsorship, approval, authorship or verification. They also allege that inaccurate or fabricated answers could be placed next to, or attributed to, the publishers’ brands, harming reputation and distinctiveness.
Copyright claims generally focus on protected expression and the rights to reproduce or distribute it. Trademark claims focus on source, sponsorship, affiliation, confusion and related brand harms. A court could treat those issues differently even when they arise from the same AI response.
Inaccurate attribution is a separate concern
An answer engine can reproduce a real passage, paraphrase a source, generate an unsupported answer, hallucinate a citation, or attach a legitimate publisher’s name to words that publisher never wrote. The plaintiffs’ theory includes the risk that users will associate erroneous output with Britannica or Merriam-Webster. Whether a particular example is persuasive will depend on the complaint, exhibits and evidence developed in the case.
Why AI answers create a different traffic problem
A conventional search result usually sends a user to a publisher’s page, where the publisher can earn from advertising, subscriptions, memberships or other engagement. An answer engine may instead provide a self-contained response, with a citation or link that the user never needs to open.
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That distinction matters to the plaintiffs’ business-impact theory. A link, a short search snippet, an AI summary and near-verbatim reproduction are not economically or legally identical. The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity’s format can deliver the value of reference content while reducing the opportunity for the original site to earn from the visit. The extent of any substitution and resulting loss remains a factual question.
Perplexity’s stated crawler and data position
Perplexity’s help documentation, last updated July 16, 2026, says PerplexityBot follows robots.txt directives. It says the crawler will not index full or partial text from a site that disallows it, although it may still index a blocked domain, headline and brief factual summary. Perplexity also says its crawler indexes pages like a search engine and does not use that indexed content for foundation-model pretraining. The company says an earlier ability to summarize a URL blocked by robots.txt has been disabled and that third-party crawlers used for its search index were updated to respect the file, particularly for news publishers. See Perplexity’s policy explanation.
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Those statements describe Perplexity’s current policy position. They do not prove what happened in 2025, whether every crawler behaved identically, or whether specific historical conduct was lawful.
Why robots.txt does not decide the case
robots.txt is a technical instruction about crawler access. Copyright law addresses protected expression and acts such as reproduction and distribution. Compliance with a robots exclusion rule may be relevant evidence, but it is not automatically a license to reproduce protected text. Conversely, leaving a site accessible to a crawler does not automatically grant permission for commercial copying.
The court may have to examine what was accessed, whether copies were retained, how indexing and retrieval worked, what appeared in user-facing answers, how much expressive material was used, whether the use was transformative, and what effect it had on existing or potential markets.
Technology layers the court may have to separate
The legal analysis can change depending on which part of the system is at issue:
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- Crawling: retrieving pages or portions of pages.
- Indexing: storing information for later retrieval.
- Search retrieval: selecting sources for a query.
- Answer synthesis: generating prose from retrieved information.
- Citation display: showing a publisher’s name or link.
- Model training: using content to pretrain or fine-tune a foundation model.
- User prompting: summarizing a URL supplied directly by a user.
A defense that addresses model pretraining, for example, may not answer an allegation about reproducing text in a retrieved answer. Similarly, displaying a citation does not by itself establish that every generated sentence came from the named publisher.
Where the lawsuit stood on August 16, 2026
The following dates come from the public docket reviewed for this article. Docket entries can be updated or supplemented through PACER.
| Event | Date or status |
|---|---|
| Complaint filed | September 10, 2025 |
| Perplexity served | September 12, 2025 |
| Motion to dismiss filed | November 3, 2025 |
| Opposition filed | November 24, 2025 |
| Reply filed | December 15, 2025 |
| Initial case-management order | December 17, 2025 |
| Fact discovery deadline | October 16, 2026, as scheduled |
| Expert discovery deadline | March 15, 2027, as scheduled |
| Case-management/pretrial conference | April 14, 2027, as scheduled |
| Merits status | No final merits judgment shown on the public docket reviewed |
The December scheduling order contemplated a jury trial estimated at two weeks. That is a scheduled plan, not a guarantee that trial will occur on those terms.
June 2026 discovery dispute
A June 1, 2026 order addressed Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s requests for documents and source code. It resolved several requests and required the plaintiffs to provide more information about people involved in researching, drafting, editing, copy-editing or authoring the works they assert. A June 26 status conference was scheduled.
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Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Legal questions that could determine the outcome
What expression is actually protected?
Facts, ideas and ordinary information generally receive less copyright protection than original expression. A short dictionary definition is not automatically free of protection: wording, examples, arrangement and editorial selection can matter. The court will need to identify the specific registered or asserted works and compare the alleged uses with those works.
What did Perplexity reproduce, and at which stage?
Evidence may distinguish between temporary crawling copies, an index, retrieved passages and final answers. The court may examine whether output was verbatim, substantially similar, a summary or independently generated, and whether the system retained copies.
Could fair use apply?
Neither an “AI summary” label nor an answer-engine business model automatically decides fair use. The analysis can depend on purpose, transformation, the nature and amount of the material used, and actual or potential market substitution. Different system stages could present different fair-use arguments.
Did users face trademark confusion?
The key questions include how prominently the marks appeared, whether they identified a linked source or suggested approval, whether inaccurate answers appeared alongside the marks, and what a reasonable user would believe about sponsorship, authorship or verification.
What damages or injunction, if any, could follow?
The parties would need evidence on ownership, copying, consumer confusion, market effects and any claimed monetary injury before a court could determine remedies. The filing of the complaint does not establish entitlement to damages or an injunction.
What this means for users, publishers and AI companies
For users, a citation is not proof that the named publisher wrote every sentence in an answer. For publishers, allowing a crawler through a technical access rule is not the same as granting broad rights to reproduce expressive content. For AI companies, separating crawling, indexing, retrieval, generation and training may be essential to both compliance and litigation defenses.
If the case produces a settlement or judgment, possible industry effects could include negotiated licenses, stricter crawler controls, changes to answer formatting and attribution, revenue-sharing arrangements, or more disputes over AI-generated search. Those outcomes are possibilities, not predictions of this case’s result.
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What readers should not conclude yet
- The lawsuit does not prove that Perplexity infringed copyright or trademark law.
- Robots.txt compliance is not a complete copyright defense, and crawler access is not automatic permission to copy.
- A scheduled jury trial is not a final determination and its dates can change.
- The case is not the separate 2026 Britannica and Merriam-Webster action against OpenAI, listed at this docket.
- The public docket reviewed through August 16, 2026 did not show a final merits ruling; later filings may provide additional information.
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