On November 2, 2026, Rothwell Figg filed two new lawsuits in the Southern District of New York against Brave Software. Rothwell filed those lawsuits on behalf of The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, Daily News and Orlando Sentinel. The lawsuits allege unlawful scraping to train AI, as well as allowing users to bypass the publishers’ paywalls.
The Complaint in each lawsuit summarized the allegations:
“This case concerns Brave’s central role in copying and distributing unlawfully acquired copyrighted content, including content scraped from The Times’s websites, to its own users and other generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) companies. Brave also offers products specifically designed to circumvent the technical measures that The Times and other content owners use to control access to their copyrighted material. Brave is the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.1 In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI “fence” that sells stolen content to third parties. And the third parties are serving as the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses.”
The case is being handled by Rothwell Figg lawyers Steven Lieberman, Jennifer Maisel, Robert Parker, Jenny Colgate, Kristen Logan, Bryan Thompson and Mary Mullins.
You can find additional information on the case through the following articles:
“News Orgs Say Brave Is 'Dealer' For Scraped Content,” Law360
“New York Times, Chicago Tribune Sue Tech Company Brave Over AI Copyright Claims,” TheWrap
“Tech company Brave plundered Daily News’ content and resold it to A.I. giants: copyright lawsuit,” New York Daily News
“The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls,” The Verge
“New York Times, Daily News Sue Over AI Scraping, Selling Content,” Bloomberg Law
“New York Times sues maker of Brave web browser over copyrights,” Reuters
“Brave faces US infringment, circumvention claims for AI copying from New York Times,” MLex
