News Corp has fired back at Brave Software with a countersuit alleging the privacy-focused browser maker scraped copyrighted articles from publications like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, then distributed that content to AI firms. The suit, filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California, calls the practice “flagrant theft” and seeks damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.
The legal chess match
Brave actually moved first. Back in March 2025, the company filed a preemptive lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its web-crawling practices fell under fair use protections. That suit came after News Corp sent Brave a cease-and-desist letter, essentially daring the browser company to knock it off or face consequences.
News Corp’s countersuit, filed on July 21, 2026 in the Oakland division of the Northern District of California, alleges that Brave didn’t just scrape articles for its own search engine. The publisher claims Brave parsed and resold copyrighted content to third-party AI companies, effectively acting as a middleman in what News Corp views as a content laundering operation.
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the alleged practice as “tacky tech trafficking” and framed it as a direct threat to the economic foundation of professional journalism. The countersuit demands both an injunction halting Brave’s scraping practices and monetary damages that could be substantial given the volume of content allegedly involved.
