New York Times and publishers sue Brave browser over scraping

Summarised from 2 outlets · Updated 2 Nov, 19:38 · Archive

The New York Times and other publications have sued Brave Software over allegations of unlawful content scraping and paywall bypassing.

The New York Times and three other US publications filed lawsuits against Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, accusing the privacy-focused web browser of unlawfully scraping and distributing their copyrighted content.

According to the complaints, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler and then monetised this by providing paid access to the content to AI companies, which use it to train models and answer user queries. The AI companies named in the suits are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The complaints also target Brave's 'Paywall blocker' feature, which allows users to access paywalled content without permission or payment, and allege that Brave blocks publishers' ads whilst selling its own.

The New York Times states in a complaint: 'Brave has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies.' A spokesperson for the Times said: 'While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct.' Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Times is also suing OpenAI and Perplexity over similar content scraping allegations.

How it is being reported

• New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scrapingThe New York Times is suing privacy-focused web browser company Brave for allegedly scraping the outlet’s copyrighted and unlawfully distributing it to its own customers, like Anthropic and Perplexity.TechCrunch · 2 Nov, 19:19
• The New York Times and other publications sue Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywallsThe New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against the company that makes the Brave web browser over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and also letting users bypass their paywalls, as reported by Reuters. According to a complaint filed by the companies that run New York Daily News, the […]The Verge · 2 Nov, 17:51

In this story: The New York Times · Brave Software · Anthropic · Perplexity · Chicago Tribune · New York Daily News · Orlando Sentinel

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