The BBC is considering legal action against AI search engine Perplexity for the alleged unauthorized use of its content to train AI models.

This information was reported by the Financial Times.

The UK broadcaster aims to address concerns about tech companies scraping its content.

Reuters has reported that it could not immediately verify this information.

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🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ From reporting on scraping to fighting against it: media’s evolving position

The BBC’s legal threat against Perplexity represents a shift in position for the broadcaster, which in 2013 published an article describing screen scraping as a widespread business practice.

In that article, the BBC quoted experts saying “every corporation does it, and if they tell you they’re not, they’re lying,” highlighting how common data scraping was even a decade ago 1.

This evolution reflects the transformation in how content owners view scraping, from a conventional competitive practice to a significant concern when used for AI training.

The broadcaster now finds itself on the defensive side of an issue it once covered as standard business intelligence gathering, demonstrating how AI has altered the stakes around content usage.

For traditional media organizations, the transition from digital publishing to the AI era represents a second wave of disruption, forcing them to reconsider how they protect their intellectual property in this new landscape.

2️⃣ The economic burden of scraping has shifted dramatically with AI

The BBC’s 2013 article described how websites could face significant infrastructure costs due to scraping, with experts noting that “up to 40% of data traffic on client sites can consist of scrapers” 1.

This burden has now transformed. While traditional scraping primarily affected server resources, AI scraping represents a potentially significant economic threat to content creators as their work can be used to build competing products.

The shift from simple competitive intelligence gathering to using content to train AI models that might replace content creators represents an escalation in both scale and consequence.

Gambling firms and travel companies once worried about competitors stealing pricing information, but media companies now face AI systems that can generate content that mimics their style and substance after training on their archives.

This represents an evolution in both the nature and scale of the economic impacts of data scraping, explaining why media companies are now taking legal action against practices they once merely reported on.

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