NYT and publishers sue Brave over AI content scraping

The New York Times, along with other major publishers, has filed a lawsuit against Brave Software in federal court, accusing the company of copyright infringement, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, anti-circumvention under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment. The core of the complaint revolves around an index of over 30 billion web pages that was reportedly collected by an unidentified crawler on Brave's platform and then offered to AI companies as a commercial product.

The publishers claim that Brave resold this content to AI developers without proper licensing, effectively moving journalism and other protected content without permission from its owners. The lawsuit also addresses a feature in Brave's browser that bypasses paywalls, allowing access to subscription content without a login. The publishers are seeking an injunction, damages, and a reevaluation of how AI data pipelines utilizing intermediaries are treated under copyright law.

The case may set a precedent for challenging unlicensed aggregation in the AI data economy and raises questions for AI companies about due diligence when purchasing training data from third parties.

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