3 Count: Perplexing Perplexity

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1: Condé Nast Has Reportedly Accused AI Search Startup Perplexity of Plagiarism

First off today, Pranav Dixit at Engadget reports that Condé Nast, the media company that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the AI company Perplexity.

According to the letter sent by the company’s CEO, Roger Lynch, AI can potentially ruin many media companies, including them. They demanded that Perplexity stop using Condé Nast websites to train their AI systems and accused the company of plagiarizing their work.

Condé Nast is the second such company to file a complaint with Perplexity. Forbes did so just last month. A recent investigation by Wired found that Perplexity’s bots do not honor Robots.txt and other tools meant to deter bots from accessing a site. Amazon has also begun an inquiry into Perplexities scraping practices.

2: German Government’s Bitcoin Selloff Nets $2.9 Billion as Film Piracy Case Marches On

Next up today, RT Watson at The Block reports that Germany has sold nearly 50,000 Bitcoin confiscated from the alleged operators of the Movie2K pirate website.

The move resulted in $2.88 billion in revenue for the country. The site was shuttered in August 2020 as part of a joint action with multiple governments and law enforcement agencies. At the time, the German government seized the Bitcoin and held it pending the case’s outcome.

That case is still ongoing. However, the German government said that they “felt compelled” to sell the coins due to a potential future loss in value. The country’s crypto wallet has now reached a balance of zero.

3: Copyright Office Finalizes Group Registration Option for News Sites

Finally today, Eileen McDermott at IP Watchdog reports that the United States Copyright Office (USCO) has finalized its decision to allow news sites to use a group registration option.

In January, the USCO opened a comment period for publishers and other stakeholders to comment on a new proposed group registration option for news websites. The goal was to make it easier for general news sites, not specialized ones, to register their work with the USCO and receive full copyright protection.

Though the USCO did modify some rules, namely its home page deposit requirement, the office opted not to expand the option to specialized news sites. This means most websites must rely on other registration approaches to submit their content to the USCO.

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