News Corp countersues search engine company Brave, accusing it of "misappropriating" copyrighted articles for AI training
[News Corp countersued search engine company Brave, accusing it of "misappropriating" copyrighted articles for AI training] The legal battle between international media giant News Corp and American search engine company Brave Software has escalated again. On Tuesday local time, News Corporation formally filed a countersuit in the federal court in Oakland, California, accusing Brave of large-scale crawling and reselling of article content from its media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post for use in artificial intelligence model training.
The legal battle between giant News Corp and US search engine company Brave Software has escalated again. On Tuesday local time, News Corporation formally filed a countersuit in the federal court in Oakland, California, accusing Brave of large-scale crawling and reselling of article content from its media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post without authorization. The counterclaim is in response to a lawsuit filed by Brave last year. In March 2025, after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from News Group, Brave took the lead in filing a lawsuit in court, requesting a ruling that its actions were legal. Brave filed an amended complaint in May this year after dual-engine negotiations broke down. Fair use or commercial plagiarism? At the heart of the legal battle: Unauthorized scraping by tech companies If commercial content is used for AI development, does it fall within the scope of "fair use"? Brave argued that it was fair use to index News Corp content for searchability and to show excerpts and "high-level overviews" to users. The company also accused News Corp of threatening to hinder progress in generative AI, which it called "the most important innovation so far this century." News Corp. vehemently denied that position in a countersuit, saying Brave's conduct "fell far short of the boundaries of fair use." The complaint states: “The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with content producers… While Brave makes a profit, Shang was excluded. " News Corp.'s counterclaim seeks an injunction and requires Brave to pay unspecified monetary damages, plus statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringement. News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement that Brave's "plunder" of News Corp. reflected a "blatant disregard" for the harm done to the dissemination of information. “If journalism is to have a sustainable future, this era of shoddy tech trafficking must end”. This case is the current global News Corporation, controlled by the Murdoch family, spans Europe, America, Australia and other places In this case, the New York Post, Dow Jones Group, and News Corp.'s operations in the United Kingdom and Australia are co-defendants in the Brave lawsuit. Brave is the smallest of the three "scale" independent search engine operators in the United States. The first two seats are Google and