AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images, giving it permission to display Getty images across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable change for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Perplexity and Getty have been working together for more than a year, a person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Although it was never announced, Getty was participating in Perplexity’s Publishers Program and planned to share ad revenue with publishers when their content appeared in search queries, the people said.
Today’s agreement is a new agreement. Officials told TechCrunch that this is not a traditional block licensing deal because Perplexity does not train its own underlying models, but did not elaborate on the terms.
Perplexity’s agreement with Getty appears to legitimize some of the company’s previous uses of Getty’s stock photos. Perplexity has come under fire over the last year for a series of plagiarism accusations from several news organizations. In one case, the startup was cited for extracting content from a Wall Street Journal article that included a photo of Getty.
At the time, some news outlets questioned whether Perplexity’s use of the images constituted copyright infringement. Last year, a source told TechCrunch that Perplexity was working on a deal with Getty but was unable to confirm the deal despite reaching out to the stock image giant several times.
More recently, Reddit sued Perplexity in October, alleging “industrial scale and illegal” scraping of user content and circumvention of technological measures to access data. Reddit has a data licensing agreement with OpenAI.
Perplexity says its deal with Getty will improve the display of images and allow it to include a link to the original source in credit each time an image appears in search results.
Nick Unsworth, Getty’s vice president of strategic development, said the agreement “recognizes the importance of properly attributed consent and its value in powering AI-powered products.”
“Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in the age of AI,” Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “Together, we are helping people discover answers through powerful visual storytelling, while ensuring they always know where their content is coming from and who created it.”
Perplexity’s emphasis on attribution is part of its strategy to defend itself against copyright charges by arguing that because published facts are not copyrightable, use of a publisher’s content (including content behind a paywall or where the publisher has explicitly indicated that it does not wish to be scraped) constitutes “fair use.”
