NYT sues Brave Software over paywall blocking and AI data sales

Readers of The New York Times and other major newspapers may face legal shifts as publishers take aim at the technology behind their access. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser company illegally bypasses paywalls and sells the resulting content to artificial intelligence companies.

The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims Brave has earned more than $100 million through these practices. According to the filing, publishers have received nothing from these transactions while Brave copies and resells their work without consent or permission.

The complaint names several prominent generative AI firms as recipients of this data, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The New York Times describes Brave as the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for both its own users and these major AI players.

The lawsuit details how AI companies pay Brave for real-time online content from its search index. These firms use the material to train their own models and to answer specific user queries. Brave’s own website states that its search API is used by major AI names, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.

The publishers accuse Brave of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. They argue that Brave directly infringes copyrights by scraping articles for its search index, its Ask Brave AI feature, and its API. The filing calls the API an illicit source of unlicensed material, including Times journalism, provided to other AI companies.

The suit further claims that Brave deliberately induces, facilitates, and profits from the copying of copyrighted content by its users and AI customers. It also alleges that Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing technological measures used by content owners to restrict access.

A key allegation involves the browser’s default settings. The lawsuit states that when activated, the Brave Browser goes behind website paywalls to provide content to users. It also blocks advertising that would appear on The Times’s website and replaces it with Brave’s own ads. This practice offers users a share of the revenue while depriving The Times of the digital advertising income needed to fund journalism.