The New York Times and other publishers sue Brave for bypassing paywalls and providing content to AI companies
U.S. publishers including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel have sued Brave Software, alleging that it scraped website content without permission and, through its Paywall blocker feature, helped users bypass the paywalls of hundreds of news outlets. The complaint alleges that Brave provided its index database of scraped content, Brave Index, to AI companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. A New York Times spokesperson, Graham James, said that Brave disregards existing copyright law and has ignored repeated demands to stop infringing.
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The lawsuit reveals that Brave provided its crawl index to multiple AI companies, shedding light on the points of contention in the news content licensing chain.
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American publishers including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel have sued Brave Software, alleging that it scraped website content without permission and helped users bypass paywalls. Brave Software is accused of providing its index database of scraped content, Brave Index, to AI companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere, and of helping users bypass the paywalls of hundreds of news media outlets through its Paywall blocker feature. Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, said in a statement: "We support the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, but Brave blatantly disregards existing copyright law and has ignored The New York Times' repeated demands that it stop its infringing conduct. We are filing this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable — it stole our content, not only to support its own products, but also to provide it to some of the world's most well-known and best-resourced generative AI companies."