The New York Times, along with three major U.S. news organizations, officially filed a lawsuit against Brave browser’s developer in Manhattan federal court on November 2, alleging that it scraped copyrighted content and illegally distributed it to artificial intelligence companies.
This legal move extends a series of tense copyright disputes, exemplified by The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, while also coming amid websites collectively blocking scraping bots to protect copyrights against the wave of large language model development.
Accused of acting as a distributor of infringing content
According to the complaint, The New York Times criticized Brave for acting as an intermediary fencing infringing content. The other co-plaintiff newspapers include the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel.
The lawsuit states that Brave used anonymous crawlers to build a search index covering more than 30 billion web pages, preventing publishers from implementing technical barriers to block them. Subsequently, Brave was accused of selling and distributing this dataset to leading AI development partners, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
The plaintiffs also targeted Brave browser’s built-in paywall bypass features, as well as its business model of blocking publishers’ ads to sell its own advertisements.
Legal pressure on the AI search business model
Founded in 2015 with a focus on protecting user privacy, Brave has raised approximately $250 million in private investment. Brave has not yet officially responded to the new allegations.
The New York Times and its co-plaintiffs are seeking a permanent court injunction against the unauthorized scraping practices, along with statutory financial damages.
The lawsuit marks a new turning point in AI-era intellectual property disputes. News organizations are no longer solely targeting entities that directly train models, but have begun cracking down on data infrastructure providers and intermediary browsers.