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3h ago

Perplexity Launches Comet Plus Revenue Share as Nikkei and Asahi Sue in Tokyo

The $5 subscription pledges 80% of revenue from an initial $42.5 million pool to publishers.

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Perplexity is facing a wave of copyright lawsuits from publishers around the world.
The Perplexity logo is displayed on a mobile phone with Perplexity seen in the background.
Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince has plans to save digital publishers from AI.

Overview

  • Comet Plus offers a $5 monthly tier that routes 80% of proceeds to participating publishers, with Perplexity setting aside $42.5 million to kick-start payouts.
  • Payouts are calculated on three signals of value creation: human visits from the Comet browser, citations in AI-generated answers, and agent actions that use a publisher’s content.
  • Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun filed a joint lawsuit in Tokyo District Court alleging Perplexity copied and stored articles and bypassed technical safeguards, seeking injunctions, deletion of stored content, and ¥2.2 billion in damages each.
  • Perplexity disputes unauthorized crawling, asserting its system fetches pages at a user’s request rather than operating as a web crawler, and says it is confident AI companies will prevail in court.
  • The legal pressure is mounting, with a U.S. judge recently denying Perplexity’s bid to dismiss a News Corp case and with Cloudflare reporting that the company circumvented blocks designed to stop scraping.