OpinionJuly 22, 2026 — 4:17pmTaking on the Murdoch empire and allegedly stealing its publishing news content was never going to go unanswered by the world’s most powerful media family.The burgeoning legal dispute between the Murdochs’ News Corp and the aptly named Brave Software will become an important test of copyright boundaries between the princes of publishing and the platform giants.Brave Software appears to have broken with the protocol of publishers doing cosy commercial deals with AI search companies to let them use their content, and in doing so, has become a burr under the Murdoch copyright blanket.“Flagrant theft”: Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is battling AI search minnow Brave Software.APBrave’s co-founder Brendan Eich is no stranger to technology companies – he was the creator of JavaScript and also co-founder of Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser. But he is taking on a formidable enemy in Murdoch, whose company has come out with guns blazing, accusing Brave of “flagrant theft”’.News Corp’s chief executive (and chief orator) Robert Thomson has vomited a wordy alliterative-filled statement on the particular brand of theft in which Brave has allegedly engaged.“Brave are content crooks and brand brigands,” he wrote. ” They have shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists’ work. Instead of a license, they have licentiously looted with blatant disregard to the severe damage done to the information ecosystem.“This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future,” he continued. “These byte burglars and bootleggers, these content contrabandists are seriously undermining the integrity of AI and IP.”Murdoch’s News Corporation fired the first salvo in the battle when it issued Brave with a cease-and-desist letter, warning the software minnow that using News Corp copy to feed into its own content and resell it to AI companies breached copyright.But it was Brave which escalated the warfare by taking preemptive legal action, seeking a court declaration that its copy scraping practices were legal.Now News Corp has countersued, so it’s off to the races.News Corp global chief executive Robert Thomson lashed out against the “tacky tech trafficking”.GettyIt might appear this is a battle that goes to the heart of the use of publishing copyright by AI firms in their search functions – the difference between fair use of content to feed into AI large language models, and wholesale theft.But it is a little more commercially nuanced than that. News Corp and Brave had engaged in negotiations, but couldn’t land on a commercial agreement.As far as News Corp is concerned, it has entered into licensing partnerships with other “legitimate AI companies” such as OpenAI and Meta who, the company maintains, respect the value of quality journalism and compensate publishers.In its legal filing this week, News Corp alleged Brave has wandered well beyond the bounds of fair use, and has rather engaged in covert scraping of its publicly available news content to on-sell it to other AI companies. This allows Brave to book revenue that cuts out News from selling directly to AI companies.The News Corp filing alleges that Brave’s conduct is very different from a lawful search engine.“By its own public admission, Brave masks its web crawlers [known otherwise as spiders or bots] such that publishers cannot detect or reliably block them. Brave then bundles extra-long snippets of up to approximately 250 words (approximately five times traditional search snippets) and/or its so-called Summarizer version of the content it copies, and then sells that verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies,” the publisher claims.News Corp calls Brave’s business model “theft by a masked intruder”. The media company is seeking damages of $US150,000 ($214,000) for each infringement as a starting point for compensation from the “byte burglars”.More:Media & marketingOpinionFor subscribersWeb cultureCopyrightCourtsAINews CorpRobert ThomsonFrom our partners