New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave Browser for Alleged Copyright Infringement

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The New York Times and several other news outlets have filed lawsuits against Brave, alleging unauthorized scraping of their copyrighted content and unlawful distribution to AI firms.

The New York Times has initiated a lawsuit against Brave, a privacy-oriented web browser company established in 2015, accusing it of unlawfully scraping copyrighted content from its website and distributing it to AI customers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, characterizes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" to AI companies, emphasizing that Brave amassed an index exceeding 30 billion web pages through an undisclosed web crawler. This crawler reportedly prevented publishers from taking measures to block its activities.

Concurrently, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel have lodged a similar lawsuit against Brave, reflecting broader concerns across the publishing industry regarding digital content protection in the AI era.

The New York Times further criticizes a feature within the Brave browser that bypasses paywalls, undermining the outlets' revenue models, and highlights Brave's practice of blocking publishers' advertisements while promoting its own, adding to the dispute.

Brave, which has accumulated approximately $250 million in funding, has not publicly responded to the allegations as of the lawsuit's filing. The Times seeks both injunctive relief to halt Brave's alleged actions and damages for the purported infringement.

This lawsuit follows similar legal actions the New York Times has pursued against other AI-related entities, signaling an escalating effort among publishers to protect their digital content against unauthorized AI usage and distribution.