Anthropic’s recent $1.5 billion settlement could open the floodgates for more publishers to sue AI companies over how they use copyrighted content.
Just this week, the Britannica Group, the parent of Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, sued Buzzy. Filed Wednesday in federal court in New York, the complaint accuses the Buzzy AI startup of infringing on Britannica’s copyright and trademark rights, and claims that its answer engine is reducing the publisher’s revenue.
Founded in 2022, Confusion calls itself “an AI-powered Swiss Army knife for information discovery and curiosity.” The company most recently made headlines in August when it made a $34.5 billion bid to acquire Google’s Chrome browser.
Confusion is known for its answer engine, which pulls data from across the web and provides quick, easy-to-read summaries to users’ questions. Britannica says these summaries often don’t augment its content without permission, diverting readers who might otherwise visit its sites, traffic the company relies on for subscriptions and advertising dollars.
“Amazing claims to be the “world’s first answer engine,” but the answers they provide to consumers are spot on in the press release.
This isn’t Confusion’s first legal battle. Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, accused the startup of illegally copying its work in the field.
However, this new lawsuit lands just weeks after Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle allegations that it used millions of pirated books to train its chatbots, signaling that publisher lawsuits could result in a big payout.
Since the rise of AI tools like Chatgpt and Claude, publishers have been trying to get tech companies to pay for the use of their content. AI companies depend on published and often protected material like websites, newspapers, magazines, and books to train their big language models and answer users’ questions.
For example, Openai is still fighting a 2023 New York Times lawsuit even as it and Google have struck licensing deals with outlets like News Corp and Reddit , respectively, to avoid further clashes. Confusion itself announced in August that it would soon start sharing some of its revenue with publishers whose news articles it uses to answer user questions.
Why is Britannica suing for confusion?
Britannica’s complaint says that Confusion scraped its sites, copied and republished articles without permission, and even attributed AI-generated hallucinated answers that could damage the brand’s reputation. Britannica claims that these actions violate both copyright and trademark law.
Britannica also says it can create content thanks to money earned through subscriptions and advertising revenue. It accuses Metllexity’s answer engine of free-riding on these investments by “cannibalizing traffic” to its own sites.
The company is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order prohibiting further use of its content.
Confusion did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
