News Corp has escalated its legal war against unauthorized use of its journalism by filing a countersuit against Brave, the privacy-focused search engine, alleging that the company scraped copyrighted articles to feed AI models in what the media conglomerate calls "flagrant theft."

Reuters reported on Wednesday that the countersuit was filed in connection with an ongoing legal dispute between the two companies. News Corp alleges that Brave systematically collected articles from its publications, which include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times of London, and other major news outlets, without permission or compensation. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI news.

The Allegations Against Brave

According to the filings, Brave scraped News Corp articles and made them available to third parties for AI training purposes. The media company argues that this constitutes direct copyright infringement, as the content was copied, stored, and redistributed without authorization from the rights holders.

News Corp's use of the phrase "flagrant theft" underscores the severity with which it views the alleged conduct. The company has positioned itself as one of the most aggressive defenders of publisher rights in the AI era, having already initiated legal proceedings against multiple technology companies over the use of its content.

Brave, founded by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, markets itself as a privacy-first alternative to Google Search. The company operates a search index built using its own crawler, which has previously drawn scrutiny from publishers who argue that their content is being indexed and repurposed without consent.

A Broader Copyright Battleground

The Brave countersuit is the latest salvo in a sprawling legal conflict between traditional publishers and AI companies. Over the past two years, numerous media organizations have filed lawsuits alleging that their content was scraped without permission to train large language models and other AI systems.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, a case that remains in litigation. Hundreds of local newspapers filed a joint copyright lawsuit against the same companies. The Authors Guild and individual authors have pursued separate legal actions against AI firms over the use of books in training data.

News Corp has been at the forefront of this fight. The company previously reached a licensing agreement with OpenAI reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars, demonstrating its strategy of pursuing both litigation and commercial deals. The Brave countersuit suggests that News Corp is now expanding its enforcement efforts beyond the largest AI companies to include intermediaries that facilitate data collection.

The Intermediary Problem

The case against Brave raises an important legal question that courts have not yet fully resolved: whether search engines and data aggregators that crawl the web can be held liable when the content they collect is subsequently used for AI training.

Search engines like Google have long operated under the principle that indexing web pages for search results constitutes fair use. However, the landscape shifted dramatically with the rise of generative AI. When a search engine's index is repurposed to train models that can generate competing content, the fair use defense becomes far less clear.

Brave's search index, built using its proprietary crawler, occupies a gray area in this debate. The company has argued that its crawling practices are standard for search engines. News Corp contends that repurposing scraped content for AI training goes far beyond what is necessary for search functionality.

Implications for the Web Scraping Ecosystem

If News Corp prevails, the case could have far-reaching implications for the web scraping ecosystem that underpins much of the AI industry. Many AI companies rely on data brokers, search indexes, and automated crawlers to collect the vast quantities of text needed to train their models. A ruling that holds these intermediaries liable could disrupt supply chains throughout the sector.

Conversely, a ruling in Brave's favor would strengthen the position of search engines and data aggregators, making it harder for publishers to control how their content is used once it appears on the open web.

Legal experts note that the outcome may hinge on specific technical details about how Brave's crawler operated, what data was collected, and how it was made available to AI developers. The distinction between indexing for search results and harvesting data for model training could prove decisive.

The Stakes for Journalism

For News Corp and other publishers, the case is about more than a single search engine. The company has argued that the unchecked scraping of journalism threatens the economic foundation of news organizations. If AI systems can generate content using material scraped from news outlets without compensation, publishers lose both readers and the advertising revenue that sustains their operations.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on the issue. While some officials have expressed sympathy for publishers' concerns, others have pushed for policies that prioritize AI development over copyright enforcement. The resolution of cases like News Corp v. Brave may ultimately depend on how courts interpret existing copyright law in the context of an industry that did not exist when those laws were written.

For now, the countersuit sends a clear message: News Corp intends to pursue every avenue available to protect its content, from the largest AI labs to the search engines that feed them data.

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