The newly announced multi-year licensing agreement between Perplexity and Getty Images is more than just a commercial deal...

Perplexity–Getty: A Turning Point for AI Licensing, Legitimacy, and Litigation

by ChatGPT-4o

The newly announced multi-year licensing agreement between Perplexity and Getty Images is more than just a commercial deal — it represents a critical moment in the ongoing battle over data rights, AI model inputs, and the future architecture of the AI ecosystem. It signals a pivot away from the “scrape first, litigate later” culture toward structured licensing, attribution, and value-sharing with rights holders.

Why This Deal Matters

Perplexity, long criticized for scraping and re-publishing content, is openly repositioning itself as a rights-respecting platform. The article notes the company has been “hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism” and that its Getty partnership “appears to legitimize some of the startup’s previous use of Getty’s stock photos”.

This deal matters because:

• It acknowledges content rights and the value of licensed media. Getty’s VP states the agreement “acknowledges the importance of properly attributed consent and its value in enhancing AI-powered products.”

• It demonstrates a clear commercial alternative to wholesale scraping. Getty is effectively shaping a licensing-first precedent, similar to music licensing reshaping digital streaming.

• It signals market pressure. Perplexity needed this to counter reputational harm and ongoing litigation risk — including Reddit’s lawsuit alleging “industrial-scale, unlawful scraping”.

In essence, this agreement marks a migration from “permissionless innovation” toward “permission-aligned AI.”

Should Others Follow?

Yes — and many now must. This deal accelerates a maturing trend toward responsible content acquisition and signals that:

• Access deals are becoming a competitive advantage

• Attribution and provenance are becoming expected norms

• Structured rights frameworks will define trust and business viability

Perplexity emphasizes “attribution and accuracy” as a user value proposition— indicating a shift in user expectations. Search and generative AI products increasingly need trustworthy, credited, and provenance-linked content to differentiate from “hallucination platforms.”

AI companies without content deals risk becoming:

• Legally exposed

• Reputationally compromised

• Product-inferior due to unverified training content

This move also bolsters the argument that responsible AI must be funded — not built on uncompensated cultural and informational extraction.

Implications for Ongoing and Future Litigation

This deal may reverberate across multiple legal fronts:

Evidence of Feasibility

Plaintiffs in ongoing scraping lawsuits can now argue:

Courts may begin viewing non-licensed scraping not as inevitable but as avoidable misconduct.

Undermining Fair-Use Defense Narratives

Perplexity is still arguing that using publisher content is fair use because “publicly available facts are not copyrightable”. Yet licensing undermines its own purity of the fair-use argument. If fair-use were bulletproof, licensing would not be necessary.

Future litigants can weaponize this contradiction.

Pressure on OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others

Getty is already suing Stability AI. With this deal, Perplexity has distanced itself from the more aggressive stance seen in other companies:

Expect plaintiffs to cite this precedent in:

• NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft

• Universal Music v. Anthropic

• Reddit v. Perplexity

• Upcoming academic publisher and image-rights cases

Strengthening Opt-Out / No-Scrape Arguments

Reddit alleges Perplexity “circumvented technical measures”— now courts can point to the Getty deal as evidence that honoring such measures is commercially normal and enforceable.

Valuation & Market Behavior

Investors may increasingly discount AI companies without:

• Clean data pipelines

• Model auditability

• Commercial licensing relationships

AI capital markets are quietly rewarding compliance.

Conclusion: A New Precedent for AI

This is not just a licensing story — it’s a strategic inflection point for AI governance and business models.

Why it matters:

• Legitimizes content-rights frameworks in AI

• Accelerates licensing adoption by rivals

• Weakens fair-use defense narratives

• Strengthens claims in ongoing lawsuits

• Signals maturity and accountability in AI markets

Prediction:
Expect accelerated deal-making across premium content sectors — research, news, video, and educational content — as litigation pressure and user trust expectations mount.

The message to developers is clear:

For rights holders — particularly scholarly publishers — this is momentum. Now is the time to formalize content licensing frameworks, enforce scraping defenses, and ensure value capture from AI ecosystem growth.