*These copyright traps have a name: “mountweazels” — a term with its own curious history — and an evolution of them is now being used by companies fending off AI data scrapers that devour vast swathes of the internet without asking permission.
In a lawsuit against four tech companies filed Wednesday and covered by The New York Times, Reddit revealed how it managed to ensnare the AI startup Perplexity with its own sort of mountweazel. The forum-based social media platform put up a “test post” on its site that could “only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet,” it said.
But within hours, Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine showed the content from the trap Reddit post.*
Perplexity Just Got Caught Breaking the Rules Red-Handed
