New York Times Sues Brave Over Paywall Bypass and AI Deals

Newspaper publishers are taking legal action against a major browser developer. The New York Times and a group of other news companies filed a lawsuit against Brave Software on Monday. They accuse the company of illegally accessing paywalled articles and selling that content to artificial intelligence firms.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, labels Brave a distributor of stolen copyrighted work. The Times states that Brave supplies content to prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The filing describes Brave as the supplier and dealer of this material for both its own users and these tech giants.

Financial figures in the suit rely on third-party revenue estimates. It claims Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publisher work without consent. According to the lawsuit, publishers have received nothing from these transactions. The Times notes that AI companies pay Brave to supply real-time online content from the Brave search index.

Brave promotes its Search API on its own website. It lists Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com as clients. The complaint argues that these companies use the supplied material to train their models and to answer specific user queries. The Times asserts that the API serves as an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material, including its own journalism.

The suit cites three main types of copyright infringement: direct, contributory, and vicarious. Direct infringement is alleged to occur when Brave scrapes articles to build its search index. It also happens when the content powers the Ask Brave AI search feature and feeds the Brave API. The filing states that Brave facilitates and profits from users and AI customers copying copyrighted content.

The lawsuit also alleges a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It claims Brave circumvented technological measures used by publishers to restrict access. The complaint points to a default setting in the Brave Browser that goes behind website paywalls to provide content to users. This setting activates automatically in some cases.

The filing highlights a conflict over advertising revenue. It states that the browser blocks ads that would appear on the Times website. Instead, it displays its own ads and offers users a cut of the revenue. This process deprives the Times of digital ad income that helps fund journalism production. The next step in this legal process involves the court reviewing the complaint and scheduling future proceedings.

Brave Software has not yet issued a formal public response to the specific allegations in the complaint. The case is now pending in the Southern District of New York. The Times and its co-plaintiffs are seeking remedies for the alleged violations of their copyright rights and the DMCA.