Brave has gone to court to head off potential legal action from News Corp over the browser maker’s auto-generated AI summaries of articles published by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
More specifically, the software house this week requested [PDF] a declaratory judgment from a federal judge in San Francisco against the owner of, among many other things, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, and The New York Post.
As well as its eponymous browser, Brave provides a web search engine that indexes sites and offers AI-generated synopses of pages, which involves scraping and analyzing people’s content. That harvesting of information, without a royalty payment in sight, has irritated News Corp to the point where the multinational has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the browser developer demanding an end to this web-crawling practice and compensation for the use of copyrighted work.
It’s heavily implied Brave will face further legal pain from the Murdoch family corporation unless it gives in, and thus it’s gone to court preemptively for a ruling affirming that its search engine practices - specifically web scraping, indexing, and AI-generated summaries - are lawful under fair use. The developer accused the media titan of engaging in an “anticompetitive bullying campaign, built on an incorrect legal premise, to enrich themselves,” for good measure.
Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, meanwhile, argues Brave is violating the law. “There is absolutely no ‘safe harbor’ for piratical, parasitical practices flimsily disguised as traditional ‘search,’” he said in a statement to The Register.
“The unauthorized scraping and reselling of our copyrighted content to AI engines and other Brave customers is blatant abuse, not fair use. It is perverse in the extreme that a company that bemusingly calls itself Brave should engage in content conduct that is so shiftily shameful.”
On February 27, News Corp’s copyright counsel wrote [PDF] to Brave CEO Brendan Eich, seeking the cessation of alleged content misappropriation and compensation for what it claims is the past unauthorized use and sale of News Corp content.
The letter says, “Brave scrapes News Corp websites without identifying itself and without authorization, and Brave includes the scraped copyrighted News Corp content into a search index that Brave licenses and sells to third parties via its Search API, in competition with News Corp’s own licensing and other monetization opportunities.”
It also accused Brave of reproducing News Corp content through “extra alternate snippets” surfaced via its Brave Search API. According to Brave’s court filing, each of these “snippets,” with a maximum of 300 characters, is a short excerpt of third-party content designed to provide relevant responses to user queries.
“Brave markets itself as a public-interest company which, among other things, is committed to ‘fight Big Tech’s terrible privacy abuses,’” the letter says. “Despite that public-facing do-good persona, Brave monetizes its widescale theft of intellectual property by selling the purloined content to some of the very same tech companies it publicly derides.”
As mentioned, Brave not only makes a free web browser but runs an independent search engine based on its own search index. There are relatively few search indexes in the world, some of the larger ones being operated by Baidu, Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yandex. Many smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo rely on an index provider like Microsoft.
Search engines work by using crawling software to fetch and index content from different websites. This is supported under America’s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and has been affirmed in subsequent court cases like this 2006 ruling [PDF] by a Nevada district court that found Google’s caching of indexed content qualifies as fair use.
News Corp, however, has long been attentive in policing its content, and its executives have a history of trying to extract licensing payments from tech giants.
With the advent of generative AI models and the way these neural networks have often been trained on mountains of people’s copyrighted content, web scraping and content usage is once again the subject of legal wrangling. Since the generative AI boom began in 2022, litigation initiated by large publishers has prompted firms offering AI models to negotiate licenses for access to copyrighted content.
News Corp’s letter claims the media goliath is supportive of AI when used lawfully, citing its content access deal with OpenAI. It also emphasizes that the publisher will litigate to protect its interests, citing its October 2024 copyright claim against AI search firm Perplexity over the AI upstart’s web scraping practices.
The letter further demands that Brave provide various business records, including a list of any AI firms that gained access to New Corp’s content via Brave Search API and Brave Summarizer, as well as the commercial terms of those deals.
Brave, in its effort to obtain the blessing of the court for its web scraping and content usage, argues that News Corp’s position, if supported by law, would prevent any new search engines from competing with incumbents like Google Search and Microsoft Bing.
“Decades of legal precedent and practice confirm that it is not copyright infringement to index website content to maintain a search engine,” Brave argues in its complaint to the federal district court. “Instead, it is fair use.”
The browser and search biz maintains it has no contractual agreement with News Corp and is not obligated to compensate the publisher. It is seeking a declaratory judgment to affirm this, aiming therefore to preempt potential copyright infringement claims from News Corp.
Brave declined to comment. ®
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