The New York Times Files Lawsuit Against Brave Over Content Scraping

The New York Times has initiated legal action against Brave Software, the developer of the privacy-focused web browser, alleging that the company has engaged in the unauthorized scraping and distribution of its copyrighted journalism. Filed in Manhattan federal court, the lawsuit claims that Brave functions as both a digital burglar and an AI 'fence,' misappropriating protected content to supply major artificial intelligence firms, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Similar legal challenges were filed simultaneously by the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel.

At the heart of the dispute is Brave’s alleged creation of a massive index containing over 30 billion web pages, compiled via an unidentified crawler that publishers claim they are unable to block. The Times argues that Brave utilizes this data to facilitate the unauthorized reproduction of its articles through its AI-powered search tools and browser features. In one instance cited in the complaint, the browser’s AI assistant reportedly reproduced nearly the entire text of a Times article, mirroring similar findings where other newspapers' content was also replicated verbatim.

Beyond the scraping allegations, the lawsuit targets Brave’s browser functionality, specifically a feature that allows users to bypass website paywalls. The Times contends that this tool, alongside the company’s practice of blocking publisher advertisements while inserting its own, constitutes a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By circumventing technological access controls, the publisher argues that Brave is actively undermining the subscription models that sustain professional journalism.

The legal filing asserts that Brave is liable for direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. The Times is demanding a permanent injunction to halt these practices and is seeking financial damages to compensate for the alleged revenue loss. While Brave has previously defended its crawler practices as necessary to avoid discriminatory blocking by websites, the company has not yet provided a formal response to these specific legal claims. This litigation marks another significant escalation in the ongoing conflict between major news organizations and technology companies over the use of proprietary content in the era of generative AI.