A new legal battle between a major news company and technology firm is brewing. The reason? The use of news content for artificial intelligence (AI). News Corp has filed a countersuit against Brave, accusing them for using copyrighted articles without permission.
According to the lawsuit, News Corp claims Brave copied news stories from their publications and then sold or shared that content with AI companies. The media company says this was done without approval and has asked the court to stop Brave from continuing such illegal practices. They have also demanded financial compensation of up to $150,000 for each violation.
In a filing obtained by The Wrap, News Corp claimed that Brave did not behave like a normal and legal search engine.
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According to the publication, "Brave masks its web crawlers such that publishers cannot detect or reliably block them. Brave then bundles extra-long snippets of up to approximately 250 words (approximately 5 times traditional search snippets) and/or its so-called summariser version of the content it copies and then sells that verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies. Brave calls this its 'Data for AI API' business; a more apt description is theft by a masked intruder."
News Corp further alleged that Brave used its copyrighted news articles in two ways. Brave shared their news content with AI companies, even though they already had its own way of licensing that content.
Brave offered News Corp's news articles to businesses using AI tools. The publication added that they were always willing to legally provide its content and said they did not take legal action earlier, even though the copyright violations continued.
"What the News Corp Companies did upon learning of Brave's flagrant theft and resale of their copyrighted journalism was to send a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Brave stop stealing and reselling its high value content.
"It was Brave who responded by filing suit. And after the News Corp Companies believed they reached agreement, having spent (perhaps the better word is wasted) over a year negotiating a fair, market-based agreement with Brave, Brave walked away and unilaterally chose litigation a second time.
"Absent an agreement, the News Corp Companies will not stand idly by while Brave's obvious theft of high value news content goes unchecked," it added.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson criticised Brave and accused the company for taking news content without permission and making money from their journalists.
He said Brave should have taken a proper licence instead of using the content without approval. According to Thomson, actions like these hurt the news industry and make it harder for journalism to survive in the future.
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