Dow Jones v. Perplexity AI: a federal judge keeps the Wall Street Journal and New York Post copyright and trademark suit in New York

What happened

• Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and NYP Holdings, Inc., the publishers of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, sued Perplexity AI, Inc. on October 21, 2024. The opinion records that they later filed a First Amended Complaint (December 11, 2024) and a Second Amended Complaint, which was the pleading before the court.
• The court's description of the claims: copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106, and false designation of origin and trademark dilution under 15 U.S.C. § 1125.
• The plaintiffs allege Perplexity infringes in three ways: by copying their works "as inputs into its RAG index," by returning outputs with full or partial verbatim reproductions, and by generating made-up text (hallucinations) and attributing it to their publications using their trademarks. RAG means retrieval-augmented generation, a database of source content that feeds the model.
• The Second Amended Complaint gives one example in which a "Perplexity Pro" user asked for the full text of a New York Post article and allegedly received a verbatim reproduction.
• Perplexity is a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco. It moved to dismiss under Rules 12(b)(2) and 12(b)(3), asked in the alternative for a transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), and separately asked to dismiss ten of the plaintiffs' works under Rule 12(b)(6) because they were registered after the first complaint was filed.

What the court said

• Personal jurisdiction: the court concluded that jurisdiction over Perplexity in New York is proper and that exercising it comports with due process.
• Venue: venue is proper in the Southern District of New York for the copyright claims under 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a) and for the trademark claim under § 1391(b)(1).
• Transfer: the court concluded that, in light of the totality of the circumstances, transfer to the Northern District of California "is not warranted or required in the interest of justice".
• The ten additional works: the court did not dismiss them. It reasoned that dismissing and refiling would not serve the efficiency principle behind the registration requirement from Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com.
• Conclusion: the motion was "DENIED in full." The court ordered the parties to meet and confer and submit a proposed case management plan by September 19, 2025.
• The opinion opens: "This case stands at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and intellectual property."

What it means for your firm

• Our reading: this ruling decides where the case is heard, not who is right. The court did not decide whether Perplexity infringed anything; the facts above are the plaintiffs' allegations.
• If your lawyers use an answer engine that cites or quotes paywalled news, the allegation of verbatim output is the part to watch, because it concerns what the tool returns, not only how it was trained.
• Attribution matters on its own: the trademark claim is about text that a tool allegedly attributes to a named publication. A fabricated quote with a real publication's name on it is a verification problem for your work product as well.
• The ruling sits next to other suits against AI companies over retrieval features. Treat each as a separate record and do not assume a result in one carries to another.
• Vendor contracts are where this reaches a firm: ask what a tool retrieves, stores and reproduces, and who bears the risk.

What to do Monday

1. List every answer engine and AI search tool your lawyers use for research, including free versions they signed up for themselves.
2. Require that any quotation from a news article or paywalled source returned by an AI tool is checked against the original publication before it goes into a filing or client memo.
3. Ask each vendor in writing whether its tool retrieves and stores full-text articles and whether it attributes generated text to named publications.
4. Put this docket on a watch list and read the current docket entries before you cite or rely on any later ruling in the case.

Sources

• Opinion and Order, Dkt. 65 (Aug 21, 2025), CourtListener RECAP copy of the docket entry
• Plaintiffs' memorandum opposing the motion to dismiss or transfer, Dkt. 53 (Mar 11, 2025), a party filing

Operational information, not legal advice. Facts come from the filings on the court docket linked under Sources, read on Oct 31, 2026. A docket moves: this brief covers only the filings we read and does not replace the live docket. The reading of what it means for your firm is ours.