News Corp countersues Brave for $150,000 per infringement over AI scraping

News Corp accused Brave Software of "flagrant theft" in a countersuit alleging the search engine scraped and resold copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to AI companies without authorization.

News Corp filed a countersuit against Brave Software on Tuesday, accusing the search engine of "flagrant theft" for scraping and selling copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to AI companies without a license.

"The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content," News Corp said in its filing in the Oakland, California federal court. "Brave profits while publishers are cut out."

News Corp is seeking an injunction and unspecified monetary damages, plus statutory damages of as much as $150,000 per infringement. The media conglomerate alleged Brave bundles "extra-long snippets" of up to approximately 250 words — about five times the length of traditional search snippets — and sells that content to enterprise customers through its "Data for AI API" business. News Corp also claimed Brave masks its web crawlers so publishers cannot detect or reliably block them.

The competing lawsuits are part of a wave of litigation pitting publishers against technology companies over the use of copyrighted content to train AI models. A ruling against Brave could reshape data scraping practices across the search industry, while a decision favoring the search engine could weaken publisher control over their content in the AI era.

Brave preemptively sued News Corp in March 2025, seeking a court declaration that its practices were legal after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. The San Francisco-based company filed a revised complaint in May 2026 following what News Corp called failed negotiations for a "fair, market-based agreement."

Brave has argued that indexing News Corp content to make it searchable and providing users with snippets and "high-level summaries" amounted to fair use. It also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt advances in generative AI, which it called "the most important innovation so far this century."

News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said in a statement that Brave's actions reflected "blatant disregard" for the damage to how information is disseminated. "This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future," Thomson said.

Brave is the smallest of three US-based companies to operate independent search engines at scale, behind Google and Microsoft's Bing. The New York Post, Dow Jones and News Corp's British and Australian operations are also defendants in Brave's original lawsuit.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.