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The New York Times and other newspaper companies filed a lawsuit against Brave Software, accusing the browser maker of illegally bypassing paywalls and selling stolen news content to artificial intelligence companies.
Lawsuit Allegations and AI Partnerships
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, stated that Brave supplies and distributes stolen copyrighted material to its users as well as major generative artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. According to the lawsuit, which cited third-party revenue estimates, Brave has generated over $100 million by copying and reselling publisher content without consent, while the publishers received nothing in return.
The legal filing stated that artificial intelligence companies pay Brave for real-time online content from its search index to train their models and answer specific user queries. The complaint referenced statements on Brave’s website indicating that the Brave Search API powers major artificial intelligence platforms including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.
Copyright Infringement and DMCA Violations
The lawsuit charged Brave with direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. Direct infringement allegedly occurs through scraping articles for the search index, the Ask Brave artificial intelligence search feature, and the Brave API, which the filing described as an illicit source of unlicensed material provided to other artificial intelligence companies.
Furthermore, the complaint accused Brave of contributory and vicarious infringement by inducing, facilitating, controlling, and profiting from the copying activities of its users and generative artificial intelligence clients. The lawsuit also asserted that Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing technological measures implemented by publishers to restrict access to their articles.
Paywall Bypass and Advertising Practices
According to the lawsuit, the Brave Browser features a default setting that allows the software to bypass website paywalls and deliver restricted content directly to the user. The browser also blocks advertisements on The New York Times website and displays its own ads, offering users a share of the revenue while depriving the publisher of vital digital advertising income needed to fund journalism.
