Brave Software has filed a lawsuit against News Corp, claiming the media giant is using unfair tactics to stop it from indexing articles from sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.
Brave, a competitor to Google, said News Corp had sent it a cease-and-desist letter, threatening legal action unless it stopped “scraping” News Corp’s websites and using the content in its search results. Brave argued that indexing web content is a standard practice for search engines, and it falls under “fair use” laws.
The legal dispute highlights concerns over the use of copyrighted material by artificial intelligence tools. Brave accused News Corp of trying to block progress in AI, specifically technologies like chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, which depend on search engine data.
Brave, which operates a search engine with less than 1% of the market share, claims that Google controls nearly 90% of the search engine market, with Microsoft’s Bing taking much of the remainder. Brave also stated that News Corp, in collaboration with Google, is trying to push it out of the search market by making it harder for new companies to compete.
News Corp responded by rejecting Brave’s claims. CEO Robert Thomson called Brave’s practices “piratical” and “parasitical,” accusing the company of unauthorized use of News Corp’s copyrighted content for resale to AI platforms and other clients. He criticized Brave for claiming to be a defender of freedom while engaging in what he described as dishonest behavior.
This lawsuit is part of a broader conflict between media companies and tech firms over the use of copyrighted content to train AI systems. News Corp recently filed a similar lawsuit against Perplexity AI for allegedly copying its articles without permission.
Brave’s legal action seeks a court ruling that using News Corp’s articles in search indexes is not an infringement of copyright.
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