The New York Times and three other American newspapers filed lawsuits against Brave Software this Monday (2) in a federal court in Manhattan, in the United States. The publications accuse the company responsible for the Brave browser of copying news reports protected by copyright and marketing its content to artificial intelligence developers without authorization.
The lawsuits were filed separately by the New York Times and by a group formed by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. According to Reuters, the plaintiffs allege that Brave uses its page collection and indexing infrastructure to provide journalistic content to AI companies.
Among the companies mentioned in the lawsuits are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. They are named as possible recipients of the material, but they are not listed as defendants in the lawsuits.
The accusations involve the use of journalistic content to train language models and services capable of answering questions with information taken from the internet.
Graham James, a spokesperson for the New York Times, told Reuters that Brave “disregarded established copyright law” and ignored repeated requests from the newspaper to stop the challenged practices.
Lawsuits also question access to content protected by subscriptions
In addition to the collection and marketing of news reports, the newspapers accuse Brave of allowing users of its browser to bypass paywalls to access articles normally available only to subscribers.
The lawsuits also question practices related to the removal of ads from the outlets and the monetization of content through Brave's services.
The New York Times asks the court for an order to stop the alleged violations and for damages.
Contacted by Reuters, Brave, Anthropic and xAI had not submitted responses as of the publication of the report. Perplexity, although not a defendant, criticized the allegations involving the company.
The lawsuits broaden the legal dispute over the use of content protected by copyright in artificial intelligence, including companies that collect and distribute information to third parties. The accusations still depend on judicial review, and there is no decision establishing Brave's liability.
