News Corp Sues Brave Over AI Copyright Claims
News Corp has filed a federal lawsuit against Brave Software alleging that Brave’s AI features and search capabilities systematically infringe News Corp’s copyrighted news content. The complaint focuses on Brave’s AI sidebar and search, claiming Brave hid web crawlers to harvest articles and produced summaries that closely mirror original texts, then sold access to scraped content to enterprise AI clients. News Corp says these practices predate March 2025, undercut its licensing efforts, and harm the economic incentives for quality journalism. The dispute follows failed licensing negotiations and prior cross-litigation in which Brave asserted fair use for indexing. The outcome could set legal precedent on web crawling, transformative use in AI, and content licensing for AI-powered search tools.
- •News Corp filed a lawsuit alleging Brave Software systematically infringed News Corp copyrighted material via its AI features.
- •The complaint centers on Brave’s AI sidebar tool and search capabilities and accuses Brave of hiding web crawlers to evade publisher detection.
- •News Corp alleges Brave scraped substantial volumes of its content prior to March 2025 and sold access to that data to enterprise AI clients.
