In their recent copyright complaint against Perplexity, the clever litigators representing Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster used the definition of “plagiarize” as one of their examples of alleged infringement. The bit of seeming irony worked; some outlets even relied on fair use to include a copy of the exhibit in their reporting. (Indeed, it’s at least two layers of fair use—first in the complaint, then in the media quotation, and arguably a third layer in the underlying Perplexity result. Fair use is everywhere once you start looking.) As the screenshot shows, Perplexity cited its sources, so it did not plagiarize, but the real irony is much deeper: one of the plaintiffs decrying the awful practice of repackaging information previously discovered and published elsewhere is an encyclopedia.

Now, it’s been a while since I checked in on their business model, but I think Encyclopedia Britannica is mostly known for…repackaging information previously discovered and published elsewhere. Encyclopedias were “stealing” facts and ideas from other people’s books back when we still called it “research,” and repackaging it into more convenient formats back when we still called those “reference works.” Sometimes they cited sources, but 99 times out of 100 the whole point of consulting an encyclopedia is to avoid digging around in primary sources. You could say Encyclopedias are the original “answer engines,”  “starving [book] publishers of revenue.”

That was certainly the pitch back when Britannica was still selling sets of paper encyclopedias to consumers. Check out this classic Britannica ad in which a mulletted kid exclaims, “This way, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting to the library” in order to write a “report about the exploration of space!” Take that, Andrew Chaikin, Tom Wolfe, and Colin Burgess (not to mention the local library). Encyclopedia Britannica just caught a free ride on all your hard work and that kid can write his report without even knowing your books exist, much less buying them. And according to the complaint, Britannica has been catching a free ride on the hard work of actual researchers and primary source authors for “over 250 years.” All that time, their raison d’etre has been doing the old school equivalent of saving you a click—saving you a trip to the library or the bookstore. And yet, somehow, people continued to write books, even with this handy short-cut available as a substitute.

The truth is, folks who want to read an entire book about the Apollo space program will still go read one; people who just want a quick summary of the facts can read an encyclopedia, or ask Perplexity, or both, and society gains nothing by forcing people to drive to the nearest research library every time they have a casual question. Society is better off when anyone is free to take facts where they find them and re-present them in new ways. The copyright cops never came for the Encyclopedia Britannica because facts are “free as the air to common use,” and that is “neither unfair nor unfortunate.” Copyright doesn’t protect information as such, only particular expressions of that information, so anyone is free to do what Britannica has done since the 18th century: take facts from one place and republish them in another, perhaps in a more convenient format. That way, knowledge can proliferate like a candle’s flame, spreading light without diminishing the one who gives it.