News Corp has hit back at search engine Brave Software with a countersuit, alleging the company committed “flagrant theft” by copying and reselling articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to artificial intelligence companies.
The dispute began when Brave took the first legal step, filing a preemptive lawsuit against News Corp after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the media company, which is led by the family of Rupert Murdoch. Brave sought a court ruling declaring its practices to be legal.
On Tuesday, News Corp filed its counterclaim in federal court in Oakland, California, arguing that Brave’s unauthorized and “covert scraping” of its copyrighted content — and the subsequent resale of that content — falls “nowhere near the bounds” of what the law considers fair use.
The countersuit stated: “The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content. Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”
News Corp is asking the court for an injunction to stop Brave’s alleged practices, along with unspecified monetary damages and up to $150,000 for each individual copyright violation. Brave and its legal team did not respond to requests for comment made outside of business hours.
Brave originally sued News Corp in March 2025, arguing that bundling copyrighted articles for licensing and sale does not constitute copyright infringement. The company updated its complaint in May 2026, following what News Corp described as unsuccessful attempts to reach a “fair, market-based agreement.”
Brave has maintained that its indexing of News Corp content to make it searchable — along with providing users with snippets and “high-level summaries” — qualifies as fair use. The San Francisco-based company also accused News Corp of threatening to slow down progress in generative AI, which Brave described as what many consider “the most important innovation so far this century.”
News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson responded sharply, saying Brave’s actions showed “blatant disregard” for the harm being done to how information reaches the public. “This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future,” Thomson said.
Brave has described itself as the smallest of the three U.S.-based companies operating independent search engines “at scale,” behind Google and Microsoft, which runs the Bing search engine.
Also named as defendants in Brave’s original lawsuit are the New York Post, Dow Jones, and News Corp’s British and Australian operations.
The competing legal actions reflect a growing national conflict between news publishers and technology companies seeking to use copyrighted material to power AI systems.
