News Corp countersues Brave Software, accusing it of scraping and reselling journalism to AI firms

What happened

In a filing in federal court in Oakland, California on July 21, 2026, News Corp countersued Brave Software, accusing it of 'flagrant theft' of copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

What News Corp alleges

News Corp alleges Brave engaged in 'covert scraping' -- disguising its web crawlers to evade publisher blocks -- and delivered 'verbatim or near-verbatim' news summaries to AI companies and enterprise customers in direct competition with publishers' own content-licensing programs. The publisher seeks an injunction and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per alleged infringement. These are allegations in a countersuit; nothing has been decided.

Brave's position

Brave denies wrongdoing. It had preemptively sued News Corp in 2025 after receiving a cease-and-desist letter, seeking a declaration that indexing website content and providing snippets and 'high-level summaries' is fair use and fundamental to how search engines operate; the company has also argued News Corp is trying to 'bully Brave out of the market' on behalf of larger tech players such as Google.

Why this matters

The case raises the open question of when an AI-generated summary stops helping readers discover journalism and starts replacing it -- and whether selling those summaries to AI companies is a licensed data product or infringement.