Article · AI translation
Thanks to IT Home reader Coje_He for the tip!
IT Home reported on November 3 that The New York Times sued Brave, a privacy-focused browser company founded 11 years ago, on Monday local time, accusing it of scraping the newspaper’s copyrighted content and unlawfully providing it to clients including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
Also on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit. Both cases were filed in federal court in Manhattan.
The New York Times has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims. This time, it called Brave a “supplier, broker and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” to AI companies.
The complaint states: “From this perspective, Brave acts like a thief, stealing publishers’ content, and like a fence in the AI industry, reselling the stolen content to third parties.” The complaint alleges that Brave used an undisclosed crawler to build an index of more than 30 billion web pages and that publishers cannot block the crawler.
The complaint also targets a feature of the Brave browser that can bypass paywalls, as well as the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads and displaying its own instead.
According to private-market tracking data, Brave was founded in 2015 and has raised approximately $250 million to date (IT Home note: about 1.666 billion yuan at current exchange rates). The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages.