A major publisher claims Brave AI copied and sold its news content. The lawsuit accuses Brave of undermining licensing deals and journalism revenue. Brave denies wrongdoing and says it only indexes public web content.
News Corp has filed a lawsuit against Brave AI, alleging that the search engine copied and sold its copyrighted news content without permission. The case highlights growing tensions between publishers and AI-driven platforms over content use, licensing, and the sustainability of journalism.
According to court documents, News Corp claims Brave AI used masked web crawlers to scrape articles from its properties, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The publisher alleges Brave then provided near-verbatim summaries of these articles to enterprise clients, mainly AI companies, bypassing traditional licensing agreements.
News Corp further asserts that Brave sold its content to AI firms that compete directly with News Corp’s own licensing programs. The complaint argues that Brave’s practices reduce the incentive for companies to pay publishers for original journalism, threatening the financial foundation of news organizations.
The two companies reportedly spent a year negotiating a licensing deal, but talks broke down. In February, Brave responded to a cease-and-desist letter by filing its own lawsuit, arguing that its AI simply indexes publicly available web content, a standard practice for search engines. Brave also accused News Corp of trying to push it out of the market to benefit larger tech partners like Google.
News Corp disputes Brave’s claim of fair use, stating that Brave’s AI does not transform the content but instead reproduces it without meaningful change. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described Brave as profiting from the work of journalists without authorization and warned that such practices could undermine the future of journalism.
This legal battle follows a series of high-profile licensing deals between publishers and AI companies. In 2024, News Corp signed a $250 million agreement with OpenAI and a $50 million annual deal with Meta. The company’s leadership has described News Corp as an “input company,” emphasizing the value of its content to technology platforms.
Other publishers have also taken action to protect their content from unauthorized AI use. For example, some have considered blocking web crawlers to prevent their material from being used for AI training, as discussed in a recent report on publisher strategies against Google’s crawler.
