AI search startup Perplexity has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images, granting the company rights to incorporate Getty’s imagery within its AI-enhanced search and discovery platforms. This agreement represents a strategic pivot for Perplexity, particularly in light of prior controversies surrounding allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, as it seeks to solidify more formal collaborations with content providers.
The licensing deal serves to validate some of Perplexity’s earlier practices involving Getty’s stock images. In the past year, the startup faced scrutiny from multiple news organizations regarding plagiarism, notably for utilizing content from a Wall Street Journal article, which included images sourced from Getty.
Additionally, Perplexity recently faced legal challenges from Reddit, which accused the company of “industrial-scale, unlawful” data scraping and of bypassing safeguards designed to limit access to user-generated content. Notably, Reddit currently has a data licensing arrangement with OpenAI.
With the new agreement, Perplexity aims to enhance the presentation of images in search results, ensuring proper attribution with links back to the original sources.
Nick Unsworth, Getty’s Vice President of Strategic Development, highlighted that the partnership underscores the importance of consent and accurate attribution in elevating AI-driven products. Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s Head of Content and Publisher Partnerships, emphasized that proper attribution is crucial in the modern age of AI, enabling users to gain insights through effective visual storytelling while remaining informed about the origins of the content they encounter.
Perplexity’s focus on accurate attribution aligns with its defense against copyright challenges, framing its content usage as “fair use” due to the non-copyrightable nature of publicly available facts, even when sourced from materials protected by paywalls or specific publisher restrictions.
