Last week, two Federal lawsuits were filed against Brave in the Southern District of New York, each of them by newspaper companies. One lawsuit was filed exclusively by the New York Times, while the second, similar lawsuit, was filed by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel. While both suits accused Brave of content scraping, saying that Brave was taking scraped IP and selling it to AI companies (Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere were named), only the New York Times suit went out of its way to target a core privacy feature of Brave.
They are requesting that Brave be forced to get rid of its built-in paywall blocker.
I found that part of the news shocking, to be honest. It blew my mind that the New York Times would put into a public document that they want to get rid of a default paywall blocker because... well, apparently the NYT is unaware that most paywalls will be bypassed no matter what browser you are on. If you right-click and open up Inspect on a web page, you can go to your settings for that page and disable JavaScript... often getting around these paywalls entirely. Rather than addressing a well-known issue, apparently the news site wants to go after one of the biggest Google competitors.
Both articles go after Brave's search engine, Brave Search, and claim that the indexer is stealing their IP and reselling it to these AI companies. Mind you, Google, from what I can find, has been completely spared. It's classic: taking out competition and letting power concentrate with one or a few companies. The NYT has gone after either the AI companies or, in this case, Brave. Google has been able to get away with it, and it isn't because they do anything special; it is because they have high-priced lawyers who these newspapers would struggle to beat in a case.
It will be interesting to see how this case plays out given that the AI companies are listed but are not defendants in this case.
“In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” the suit reads. It says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it.
“Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “publishers have received nothing.”
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