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

The New York Times and other outlets, including the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, have sued Brave, a privacy-focused web browser company, for allegedly scraping their copyrighted content and unlawfully distributing it to customers like Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The lawsuit claims that Brave built an index of over 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. The suit also targets Brave's browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, likening Brave to a 'supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content'.

The two lawsuits were brought in federal court in Manhattan on Monday. Brave has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers. The Times seeks an injunction and damages.

This lawsuit may have significant consequences for Brave's business model, particularly its practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The outcome of the lawsuit could also impact the broader debate over content scraping and the use of AI in news publishing.