CNN just sued Perplexity for scraping 17,000 stories, videos, and images without permission. The lawsuit is making headlines in tech and media circles. Most marketing leaders read it and moved on.
They should not have. Why?
Understanding the lawsuit
Perplexity did what all other LLMs are doing.
Perplexity took content it did not own. It used that content to build a product. It made money from that product. CNN tried to negotiate a fair deal but the talks broke down. And Perplexity kept scraping. Needless to say, CNN went to court.
The fact that AI was involved does not change the basic principle. Taking someone else’s work without permission and profiting from it has a name. It has always had a name.
And this is not a one-off story. The New York Times, Dow Jones, News Corp, the Chicago Tribune, and others have all filed similar suits against AI companies in the past two years. A pattern is forming. The legal system is catching up with the technology, we presume.
But how is it impacting us, the marketers and the marketing leadership.
What is your marketing team doing now?
This might sound little uncomfortable.
Every marketing team in all hues, is leveraging LLMs one way or the other.
They are researching topics, summarising competitor content, pulling together industry data, and generating first drafts. They are doing this with Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and a growing list of other tools.
And most of them are doing this without any clear policy on where that content comes from or who owns what comes out.
In smaller brands, there are often no guardrails at all. And even where guidelines exist on paper, they are treated as flexible suggestions, not hard rules. In larger enterprises, there is more governance, but it tends to be narrow. It focuses on what data employees can feed into an LLM, not on what content comes out and whether it can be legally published under your brand name.
Nobody is asking the harder question: if your AI-generated content is built on scraped or unlicensed material, what is your company’s actual exposure?
Most marketing teams do not know the answer.
Worse, most marketing leaders have not asked.
This is Not Media Industry Problem
Is the CNN-Perplexity case a media industry problem?
I consider not because I belive that today, every brand is trying to be a media brand.
They are producing tons of content – some brands publishing 50 posts a week, some creating 10 videos a week, larger enterprises even writing reports, POV, etc by leveraging those AI tools. All of them are using it in some way and trying to build a strong brand voice.
So, the ownership question cuts across all of them – equally.
The legal risk does not shrink because your company is smaller or because you are in a different sector. And the reputational risk scales directly with how loudly you have been claiming AI leadership.
The brands most exposed are not the quiet ones. They are the ones with “AI-first” in their positioning and no content governance policy behind it.
That gap between the claim and the practice is where the real risk lives.
Questions CMOs should ask NOW
Yes, these are the questions you should be asking NOW, if you are a marketing leader.
Question 1: Which AI tools is your marketing team using, and do you have a written policy covering how those tools are used for content creation, research, and publishing?
Question 2: Does your legal team know which tools your marketing function is actively using? Have they reviewed the terms of service of those tools from an IP and content ownership perspective?
Question 3: If a client, a journalist, or your board asked you to walk them through your marketing team’s AI content policy, could you do it clearly and confidently in 15 minutes?
If you stil do not have an answer to this, it might not unusual. It reflects where most organisations are right now. But the window to get ahead of this is closing faster than most people realise.
Marketing cannot shrug the responsibility
From my experience, talking to folks across industry and the brands that I have worked with – it concerns me.
For most of them, AI governance is not part of marketing but either owned, dictated by the CIO, CTO or even the Risk Office. And where do they focus – always on data security, model access, and infrastructure risk. Important things. But they are not the same as content governance.
Marketing is hardly the part of this decision.
And that is a problem, because marketing is the function creating and publishing AI-assisted content at scale. Marketing is the function whose output is the most visible, the most public, and the most directly connected to brand reputation. And yet, in most companies, marketing is waiting for someone else to set the rules.
So who will decide? Marketing leaders should step in NOW.
Because if they do, they can build a clear content governance framework and make it part of their AI strategy. They will not just reduce risk but also build something more valuable. They will build credibility with clients, with boards, and with the industry; with guardrails intact.
The point is that the content your team creates, the research it relies on, and the tools it uses every day are now part of a legal and ethical conversation that is just getting started. Treat it as a legal department problem and you will always be behind. Treat it as a marketing leadership responsibility and you will be ahead of most of your peers.
Whose content is it anyway? Right now, most marketing teams genuinely do not know. That answer needs to change.
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