Italy’s Reti Televisive Italiane (RTI) and Medusa Film, both part of the Mediaset Group, have launched legal action against US-based generative AI company Perplexity AI.

This lawsuit, filed with the Civil Court of Rome, marks the first legal challenge in Italy specifically targeting copyright infringement related to the unauthorised use of content for training AI systems.

According to RTI and Medusa, Perplexity AI has extensively and without permission utilised a vast array of their proprietary audiovisual and film content to train its artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs assert that this constitutes a clear violation of copyright and other related rights.

The lawsuit seeks a declaration from the Court that Perplexity AI’s conduct is unlawful, a halt to any further unauthorised use of their content, and an order for Perplexity AI to pay damages. Additionally, RTI and Medusa are requesting the imposition of a daily penalty for any future infringements.

In 2024, Mediaset made a proactive move to safeguard its content from being used to train AI algorithms. The broadcaster introduced a new disclaimer in the closing credits of popular programmes such as Big Brother and Uomini e Donne. This statement explicitly prohibits “any use of broadcast images for the purpose of training generative artificial intelligence systems, as well as the use of automated data scraping.”

Mediaset, through its TV production subsidiary RTI, is particularly concerned about ‘data scraping’. This practice involves the automated extraction of vast amounts of data from online and other sources, which is then fed into AI algorithms for machine learning training. When a company’s copyrighted content, such as a news article or a TV programme segment, is scraped and used in this manner, it constitutes copyright infringement.

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Categories: AI, Articles, Policy, Regulation

Tags: AI, italy, mediaset