Technology1 min read

New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping

By · Via TechCrunch · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The New York Times, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel allege that Brave scrapes protected articles to supply developers like Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Court filings characterize the browser company as a digital fence that compiles billions of inaccessible pages for outside commercialization. Furthermore, the complaints attack the software maker for circumventing publisher paywalls while replacing original advertisements with its own commercial inventory. Brave, which was founded in 2015 and has raised around $250 million, has not yet commented on the legal claims.

Key points

  • Publishers are escalating efforts to stop tech intermediaries from packaging journalism f…: Publishers are escalating efforts to stop tech intermediaries from packaging journalism for outside artificial intelligence developers.
  • The litigation directly challenges browser features that bypass established news paywalls…: The litigation directly challenges browser features that bypass established news paywalls and strip original digital advertising.
  • The legal dispute marks an extension of ongoing copyright battles previously launched aga…: The legal dispute marks an extension of ongoing copyright battles previously launched against organizations like OpenAI and Perplexity.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

The New York Times sued Brave, the 11-year-old, privacy-focused browser company, on Monday, alleging it scraped the outlet’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit. Both were brought in federal court in Manhattan.

The New York Times, which has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, likens Brave to a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.

“In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” the suit reads. It says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it.

The suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own.

Founded in 2015, Brave has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers. The…

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