The New York Times and other newspapers sued Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser maker illegally circumvents paywalls and sells copyrighted news content to artificial intelligence companies. The complaint claims Brave copied and resold publishers’ work without permission, provided paywalled material through its search products, and shared that content with major AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
Publishers accuse Brave of reselling copyrighted content
“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 the lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Citing third-party revenue estimates, the lawsuit 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. It alleges that those companies use content from the index to “train their own AI models” and respond to specific user queries.
The lawsuit 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.”
Complaint targets Brave Search and its API
The New York Times accused Brave of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. The complaint alleges that Brave directly infringes copyright by scraping articles for its search index, its AI search feature “Ask Brave,” and the Brave API.
According to the lawsuit, the API “acts as an illegal source of unauthorized copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies.” The complaint further alleges that Brave is 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.”
Paywall circumvention and advertising allegations
The lawsuit also claims that Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing technological measures that the New York 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.
The complaint further alleges that Brave “blocks ads that would otherwise appear on the Times’ website and instead displays its own ads, depriving the Times of the digital advertising revenue that funds its expensive efforts to produce journalism, while giving away a portion of that revenue to users.”
Source: arstechnica.com