Overview
- The countersuit, filed in federal court in Oakland on July 21–22, accuses Brave of covertly scraping and selling versions of Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles to AI companies.
- News Corp says Brave masked its web crawlers so publishers could not reliably block them, then provided long extracts of roughly 250 words or near‑verbatim ‘summaries’ through a commercial "Data for AI" API.
- Brave previously sued News Corp in March 2025 seeking a court ruling that its indexing, snippets and high‑level summaries are lawful and amount to standard search activity and fair use.
- News Corp is asking the court for an injunction, orders to delete alleged infringing databases, unspecified monetary damages and statutory damages up to $150,000 per willful infringement.
- The dispute follows a failed year of licensing talks and joins a broader wave of publisher lawsuits over AI use of news content that could reshape how publishers are paid and how search engines and AI services use journalistic material.