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> So it sounds like they definitely scraped the content and used it for training, which is legal

It certainly seems legal to train. But the case is about scraping without permission. Does downloading an article from a website, probably violating some small print user agreement in the process, count as distribution or reproduction? I guess the court will decide.

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According to the article, they are complaining that the downloaded content had "been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries." Derived works.

“Reproduce” in this context reads like “copy/republish”, which would not be a derivative work.

Yes, if it's an exact copy, but I don't know if their system is actually presenting entire articles, or just fragments (copyrightable, perhaps) and perhaps mixing them with other text.

Reproducing articles is not "deriving" anything. It's reproducing.

Generally the court practice so far was that if you don't register or login, you never accept the user agreement. If the website is still willing to serve content to non-registred users, you're free to archive it. How you can use it afterwards is a separate question.

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