News Corp has filed a countersuit against technology company Brave, accusing it of using copyrighted news articles without permission and reselling the content to artificial intelligence companies.
According to the lawsuit, News Corp alleged that Brave copied articles from its publications and sold or shared them with AI firms without authorisation. The company has asked the court to stop the practices and sought damages of up to $150,000 for each copyright violation.
In the court filing, News Corp claimed Brave did not operate like a conventional search engine. It alleged that Brave masked its web crawlers to make them difficult for publishers to detect or block and reproduced news articles through lengthy excerpts of up to 250 words or AI-generated summaries.
The media company alleged that Brave then sold this content through its "Data for AI API" business to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies.
News Corp said it already licenses its news content and accused Brave of offering its articles to AI businesses without entering into a licensing agreement.
The company said it initially sent Brave a cease-and-desist notice instead of filing legal action and later spent more than a year negotiating what it described as a fair commercial agreement. According to the filing, Brave eventually withdrew from the negotiations and chose litigation.
"Absent an agreement, the News Corp Companies will not stand idly by while Brave's obvious theft of high-value news content goes unchecked," the filing stated.
News Corp Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson criticised Brave, accusing the company of profiting from journalism without permission. He said Brave should have obtained a licence to use the content and argued that such practices undermine the news industry and threaten the sustainability of journalism.
Brave has filed its own lawsuit against News Corp.