The New York Times and several other media outlets have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser. They accuse it of illegally collecting content protected by copyright, notably to train artificial intelligence models, and of enabling its users to circumvent news sites’ paywalls. The case was reported by Reuters.
The New York Times filed a complaint, the document for which is accessible online. Another lawsuit, based on the same grievances, has been filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel. According to this second complaint, Brave Software allegedly profited from its index, an automatically collected database of websites, by giving AI companies paid access to ‘real-time online content from Brave’s index.’ These companies would then use this index to train their models, to respond to ‘specific user queries,’ or for both purposes.
The plaintiffs claim that Brave provided ‘stolen copyrighted content’ to ‘numerous’ AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The complaint also highlights that Brave promotes ‘hundreds of top publishers’ accessible through its ‘Paywall blocker’ feature, which allows paywalls to be bypassed.
In the complaint text, the publishers write that Brave ‘never sought permission from publishers to access their sites, let alone copy their content and provide it to its users or other AI companies.’ They add that Brave ‘has never compensated publishers’ for this use.
In a statement to The Verge, Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, states that the newspaper believes ‘in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI,’ but that Brave has ‘flouted established copyright’ and ignored ‘repeated requests’ from the paper to cease its practices. He specifies that the lawsuit aims ‘to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content’ to fuel its own products and supply it to ‘some of the most prominent and well-funded generative AI companies in the world.’
Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed the complaint on behalf of the three other publications, denounces what he calls a system for reselling content. ‘AI giants are now desperately trying to avoid being caught red-handed stealing information from publishers, so Brave Software sells them a backdoor to journalism they know they have no right to,’ he states. He adds: ‘Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate.’
Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, and Cohere did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge. Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communications at Perplexity, responded on social media by criticizing The New York Times, accusing it of ‘paying its lawyers too much and its journalists too little.’
An update published on November 2 clarifies that the complaint was filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, and not by the companies that publish them. It adds the statement from the attorney who filed the complaint on behalf of these publications.
