News Corp has filed a counter-suit to Brave’s pre-emptive legal action regarding its AI practices.
News Corp has filed lawsuit accusing the search engine Brave Software of “flagrant theft” in its AI use.
The Murdoch-owned publishing house accused the browser of distributing and selling versions of its New York Post and Wall Street Journal to AI companies, Reuters reported.
News Corp said that Brave’s unauthorised “covert scraping” and resale of its copyrighted articles fall “nowhere near the bounds” of acceptable legal conduct, which would fall under fair use policies.
The publisher is seeking an injunction, an unspecified amount of monetary damages, as well as up to $150,000 per infringement, the federal court of Oakland, California (where the case has been filed) confirmed.
“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 argued. “Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”
This is a counter-suit to an earlier case, which Brave pre-emptively began after News Corp sent the company a cease-and-desist letter. The search engine had hoped the courts would declare its practices were legal.
The original complaint was filed in March 2025, but was later revised after News Corp and Brave failed to negotiate a ‘fair, market-based agreement’.
The browser company argued that indexing News Corp content and making it searchable, as well as creating snippets and “high-level summaries” of the content were within the bounds of fair use.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson condemned Brave’s practices. He said: “Brave’s looting of our content reflects a blatant disregard for the damage inflicted on how information is disseminated. This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future.”
Bloomsbury among AI beneficiaries
News Corp is not the only publisher taking AI firms to court.
Bloomsbury Publishing UK recently confirmed it is among the beneficiaries of a $1.5bn (roughly £1.12bn) settlement in a landmark case.
The publisher accused Anthropic of using copyrighted materials to train its AI models without purchasing content.
A US court identified 14,087 Bloomsbury titles covered by the settlement – with proposed compensation sitting at around $3,000 per title, split between the publisher and the author.
This settlement is the largest known copyright payout in US history.
