New York Times and 3 papers sue Brave over scraped content
The suits allege Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages and passed the content to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
Summary
The New York Times has sued Brave Software, maker of the privacy-focused Brave browser, in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the company scraped its copyrighted content and distributed it to AI companies. The case extends publishers' copyright fight beyond model builders to a supplier of web data. The New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit in the same court on Monday.
According to TechCrunch's report, the Times describes Brave as a supplier, dealer and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for AI companies. The suit says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. It names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave's customers, and likens Brave to a burglar that takes publishers' content and a fence that sells it to third parties.
The three newspapers' complaint says Brave made money in part by selling AI companies paid access to real-time content from its index, which those companies use to train models, to answer specific user queries, or both. The Times' suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims. In the OpenAI case, top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee backed the publishers in a court filing, the Times reported. Separately, Anthropic faces a lawsuit from Authentic Brands Group, filed October 23, over 274 Elvis Presley songs.
The New York Times sued Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser, in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, alleging it scraped the newspaper's copyrighted content and distributed it to AI companies.
The case carries the publishers' copyright fight beyond the companies that build models to a supplier of web data: the Times' suit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as Brave's customers. The New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit in the same court on Monday.
The Times describes Brave as a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies, according to TechCrunch's report. The suit says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, which left publishers unable to block it.
“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.
The three newspapers' complaint says Brave made money from its index in part by selling AI companies paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index.” Those companies use it to train their models, to “respond to specific user queries,” or both, the complaint says.
The Times' suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The Times seeks an injunction and damages.
Brave was founded in 2015. The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, and in the OpenAI case top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee backed the publishers in a court filing, The New York Times reported on October 30. Anthropic, one of the customers named in the new suit, separately faces a lawsuit from Authentic Brands Group, filed October 23, over 274 Elvis Presley songs.