This article was AI-generated as part of an experimental historical-content project. The date reflects the period being analyzed rather than the date the article was originally written.
Yesterday a federal judge in Manhattan denied Perplexity’s motion to dismiss, or alternatively transfer, the lawsuit brought by Dow Jones and NYP Holdings, the News Corp companies behind The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Headlines will say the suit survives. That is accurate, and it is easy to read too much into. For communications teams following these cases, it helps to know what kind of ruling this was.
What Perplexity asked for
The motion was mostly about place and procedure, not about whether Perplexity infringed anything. Perplexity, a Delaware company based in San Francisco, argued that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over it in New York and that New York was the wrong venue. As a fallback, it asked for the case to be moved to the Northern District of California. Separately, it sought to dismiss claims over ten additional articles the publishers added after registering them with the Copyright Office.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s 61-page opinion denied the motion “in full.” Much of the analysis concerns Perplexity’s New York contacts as the complaint describes them: registration to do business in the state, office space, employees including its co-founder and chief strategy officer, New York job listings and a network of campus strategists at local universities. The court found those contacts sufficient. It also found the ten additional works timely.
What it did not decide
At this stage a court generally accepts the complaint’s well-pleaded allegations as true, and the opinion says so in its second footnote. So the detailed description of how Perplexity works, a retrieval index of “content from original sources” handed to a language model that “repackages” it, is the publishers’ account, not a finding. Nothing here decides whether that copying is fair use, whether the outputs infringe, or whether the trademark claims will succeed. The parties now have until September 19 to submit a proposed case management plan. Discovery is the usual next stage.
Why procedure still matters
This is where the ruling becomes relevant beyond the two parties. The case stays in New York, and it moves toward discovery, where the actual mechanics of an answer engine’s index can become part of a public record rather than a matter of product marketing and complaint exhibits.
The publishers’ claims also include a theory that matters to every brand. They allege Perplexity is “generat[ing] made-up text (hallucinations) in its outputs and attribut[ing] that text to Plaintiffs’ publications using Plaintiffs’ trademarks,” and that this is “likely to cause confusion or mistake.” At the end of 2023 I wrote about a similar claim in the New York Times lawsuit. A citation that points to a reputable outlet while carrying a sentence the outlet never wrote is a problem for the publisher. It is also a problem for whichever company that sentence describes.
What communications teams should take from it
Do not read this as a verdict on cited answers. It decided where the dispute will be heard and that it will continue. For now, the status of publisher content inside answer engines stays contested, and the contest is public. Licensing deals and lawsuits will keep running side by side, and both will shape what an answer engine is allowed to say, and whose name it is allowed to attach.
In practice, when an answer attributes a claim about your company to a major publication, check that the publication actually said it. If it did not, you have two problems: a factual one and an attribution one. The second is now the subject of active litigation, which makes it worth documenting carefully when you find it.