The New York Times and other newspapers sued Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser maker bypasses paywalls, copies copyrighted news articles, and sells that content to artificial-intelligence companies. The lawsuit claims Brave has earned more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without permission, while the publishers received no compensation.
Allegations about Brave’s AI business
“Brave is a supplier, seller, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere,” the New York Times claimed in its lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Citing third-party revenue estimates, the complaint alleges that “Brave earned more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ copyrighted works without their consent or permission,” while “publishers received nothing.”
“AI companies pay Brave to provide real-time online content from the Brave search index,” the complaint says. According to the lawsuit, those companies use content from the index to “train their own AI models” and respond to specific user queries. The complaint also points to Brave’s website, which says the Brave Search API is “used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.”
Copyright and paywall claims
The lawsuit accuses Brave of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. It alleges that Brave directly infringes copyright by scraping articles for its search index, its AI search feature “Ask Brave,” and the Brave API, which the Times describes as “an illegal source of unauthorized copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies.”
The Times also accuses Brave of being a “contributor and vicarious infringer when it knowingly induces, facilitates, controls, and profits from the copying of copyrighted content by users and GenAI’s customers.” The lawsuit further alleges that Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing technological measures that the Times and other content owners use to restrict access to their articles.
“Brave Browser includes a default setting that, when launched, causes the browser to go behind a website’s paywall and serve paywalled content to the user,” the complaint states. It also alleges that the browser blocks advertisements that would otherwise appear on the Times’ website and displays Brave’s own ads instead. According to the complaint, this deprives the Times of digital advertising revenue that supports its journalism while giving part of Brave’s advertising revenue to users.
Source: arstechnica.com
