THE CRUNCH
The New York Times has sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, alleging unlawful scraping of news articles and helping users bypass paywalls. A separate lawsuit was filed the same day in the same court by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. Both suits were filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The complaint alleges Brave sells AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index", which they use to train models or answer user queries. It names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as alleged recipients of what the suit calls stolen copyrighted content. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the lawsuit claims Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work while publishers have received nothing.
The suit also accuses Brave of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing access restrictions, and says a default browser setting takes users behind paywalls. Ars Technica tested the Mac browser and found the optional paywall blocker, enabled by default, did allow reading a paywalled New York Times article. The feature can be turned off.
The NYT is seeking a permanent injunction, statutory and actual damages, and restitution of profits, including revenue from what it calls Brave's ad-substitution scheme, in which Brave replaces a site's adverts with its own and shares revenue with users. An NYT spokesperson said the paper had repeatedly asked Brave to stop its "infringing conduct" before filing.
Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Perplexity, which is not a defendant but faces a separate NYT lawsuit, called the case "disinformation" without identifying any specific inaccuracies. The NYT has previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training, a case heading towards trial.