News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, countersued Brave Software on Tuesday, accusing the tech company of copyright infringement.
In a filing obtained and viewed by TheWrap, the Murdoch family-owned company accused Brave of scraping, copying and reselling copyrighted work from their publications to AI companies without permission.
“That creative endeavor is what copyright protects, and it is precisely what artificial intelligence (hereinafter ‘AI’) companies extract and reproduce when they ingest and replicate copyrighted news articles,” the Tuesday filing stated. “Companies like Brave incorporated copyrighted works into their products and services to generate revenue for themselves, all while destroying the incentive for anyone to ever pay the very publishers who produced the content that Brave has monetized.”
The filing continued: “Brave claims that News Corp Companies’ 2025 cease-and-desist letter to Brave targeted ‘Brave’s core, traditional search engine product,’ challenging ‘the most basic function of a search engine—indexing publicly available content – [as] copyright infringement’ … But the News Corp Companies have never objected to lawful search engine activity. A lawful search engine operates transparently and synergistically: it crawls publicly-available content in a manner that enables website owners to block access if they so choose, stores that content in a searchable index and delivers brief snippets – traditionally around 50 words – alongside links to the original source. It is a properly balanced
tool of discovery designed with adequate guardrails to ensure it does not act as a tool of competitive substitution.”
Yet, News Corp alleged that Brave acted “very different from a lawful search engine,” adding, “Brave masks its web crawlers such that publishers
cannot detect or reliably block them.”
“Brave then bundles extra-long snippets of up to approximately 250 words (approximately 5 times traditional search snippets) and/or its so-called summarizer version of the content it copies and then sells that verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies,” the claim noted. “Brave calls this its ‘Data for AI API’ business; a more apt description is theft by a masked intruder.”
Per News Corp’s filing, the company has allegedly used the copyrighted content for two purposes: “sell that content to AI companies in direct competition with the News Corp Companies’ own content licensing programs” and “offer substitute versions of the News Corp Companies’ articles as a data source for digital businesses wishing to merge off-the-shelf generative AI tools with a stream of reliable news articles.”
The legal team for News Corp defended that they never refused to license their copyrighted content, noting that they even refrained from filing a suit against the company amid the alleged “ongoing copyright infringement.”
“What the News Corp Companies did upon learning of Brave’s flagrant theft and resale of their copyrighted journalism was to send a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Brave stop stealing and reselling its high value content,” the filing added. “It was Brave who responded by filing suit. And after the News Corp Companies believed they reached agreement, having spent (perhaps the better word is wasted) over a year negotiating a fair, market-based agreement with Brave, Brave walked away and unilaterally chose litigation a second time. Absent an agreement, the News Corp Companies will not stand idly by while Brave’s obvious theft of high value news content goes unchecked.”
In the counterclaim, News Corp clarified that they hope to achieve a finding that Brave infringed on its copyrights, a permanent injunction stopping the alleged infringement, an order for the destruction of databases containing the alleged infringing material, as well as damages.
News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson followed the filing with a fiery statement against Brave, slamming the company as “content crooks and brand brigands.”
“They have shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists’ work,” he said. “Instead of a license, they have licentiously looted with blatant disregard to the severe damage done to the information eco-system. This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future. These byte burglars and bootleggers, these content contrabandists are seriously undermining the integrity of AI and IP.”
As noted in the countersuit, the dispute stems from a February 2025 cease-and-desist letter sent by News Corp to Brave, in which it alleged the company of unlawfully scraping and using its copyrighted content. However, the situation escalated, with Brave responding with a lawsuit defending that it only indexed website content. Brave also accused News Corp of trying to “bully [the company] out of the market.”
A representative for Brave did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
