Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images
AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images, giving it permission to display images from Getty in its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to create more formal content partnerships.
Perplexity and Getty have been working together for more than a year, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Although it was never announced, Getty was part of Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, a plan to share ad revenue with publishers when their content showed up in a search, the source said.
Today’s agreement is a new deal. A source told TechCrunch that it is not a traditional lump sum licensing deal, as Perplexity does not train its own fundamental models, but would not comment on the terms.
Perplexity’s deal with Getty appears to legitimize some of the startup’s past use of Getty’s stock photos. The Stunner has come under fire in the past year due to a series of plagiarism allegations from various news organizations. In one case, the startup was called out for lifting content from a Wall Street Journal article, including the Getty photo in that piece.
Several points of sale at the time questioned whether Perplexity’s use of the images played a role copyright infringement. A source told TechCrunch last year that Perplexity was working on a deal with Getty, but we were unable to confirm the deal after contacting the stock image giant several times.
More recently, Reddit has sued Perplexity in October, for “industrial-scale unlawful scraping” of user content and circumventing technical measures to access data. Reddit has a data licensing agreement with OpenAI.
Perplexity says the Getty deal will help it better display images and include credits with links to the original source when images appear in search results.
Nick Unsworth, vice president of strategic development at Getty, said the agreement “recognizes the importance of properly granted consent and its value in improving AI-powered products.”
“Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI,” Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “Together we help people find answers through powerful visual storytelling, while ensuring they always know where the content came from and who created it.”
Perplexity’s emphasis on attribution is part of its strategy to defend against copyright charges by arguing that use of publishers’ content — including content behind a paywall or that publishers have explicitly indicated they do not want to be delisted — constitutes “fair use” because publicly available facts are not copyrightable.
