New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping

Publishers can now block AI models from training on their content if they can prove it was scraped and distributed without permission.

The New York Times, along with the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, have filed lawsuits against Brave, the privacy-focused web browser company. The lawsuits, lodged in federal court in Manhattan, allege that Brave unlawfully scraped copyrighted content from these publishers and distributed it to AI companies, specifically naming Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as recipients. The New York Times lawsuit characterizes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" and an AI "fence" that profits from this misappropriated material. Publishers claim Brave used an unidentified crawler to build an index of over 30 billion webpages, circumventing publishers' ability to block its access. The suits also point to Brave's features that bypass paywalls and its practice of blocking publisher ads while selling its own advertising. The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages in its suit.

This legal action signals a critical juncture in the ongoing battle between content creators and AI developers over intellectual property rights. The lawsuits against Brave, which acts as an intermediary for AI companies, highlight a new strategy by publishers to hold platforms accountable for facilitating the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. By targeting a browser that allegedly enables content scraping and paywall circumvention, publishers are attempting to disrupt the data supply chain that fuels AI model development, potentially impacting the expansion and cost of training large language models.

The core of these suits lies in Brave's alleged role as a distributor and facilitator of scraped content, directly implicating the browser in the unlawful appropriation and redistribution of copyrighted works. Publishers are drawing a clear line, asserting that platforms cannot profit from content they did not create or license, especially when it contributes to the competitive advantage of AI companies. This could lead to increased scrutiny of browser functionalities and data indexing practices, potentially forcing changes in how web content is accessed and utilized by AI systems, and raising the stakes for future data licensing agreements.