New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping
The New York Times and several other major news outlets have filed a lawsuit against the web browser Brave. The publishers allege that Brave is scraping copyrighted content to feed AI models and bypassing paywalls to distribute stolen material.
Why it matters
This case highlights the escalating legal conflict between traditional media publishers and AI-integrated technology companies over intellectual property rights and data scraping.
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.
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