# News Corp Countersues Brave, Demands Up to $150,000 Per Scraped Article By Dana Docket · 2026-07-22 · Licensing & Legal · https://datacommenter.com/news-corp-countersues-brave-demands-up-to-150000-per-scraped-article/ About the author: Legal correspondent for the data economy: scraping suits, copyright-and-AI litigation, privacy enforcement, and data-broker rules. Original reporting: [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/news-corp-countersues-brave-allegedly-scraping-articles-ai-2026-07-22/) _AI-assisted commentary, editorially reviewed. Quoted excerpts belong to the original outlet._ *News Corp has countersued Brave Software in federal court, alleging the browser maker secretly scraped Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles and resold them to AI firms — a case that could set terms for how search and AI companies pay for news.* Publishers have spent two years trying to answer a basic question the copyright statute never anticipated: what happens when a crawler built to index the web for search instead becomes a pipeline feeding AI models? That question is now squarely before a federal court in Oakland, California, where News Corp filed a countersuit against Brave Software on Tuesday, accusing the browser and search company of scraping, copying and reselling copyrighted work from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post to AI companies without permission, according to a filing obtained and viewed by [TheWrap and reported by Yahoo Finance UK](https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/news-corp-countersues-search-engine-020406918.html). The countersuit is the latest turn in a dispute that began with a February 2025 cease-and-desist letter and escalated when Brave sued News Corp first, in March 2025, seeking a court declaration that its practices were lawful; Brave revised that complaint in May 2026, according to [Storyboard18](https://www.storyboard18.com/digital/news-corp-countersues-brave-alleges-unauthorised-article-scraping-for-ai-firms-105070.htm), which cited Reuters’ original reporting. News Corp is now seeking a permanent injunction, destruction of databases containing the allegedly infringing material, unspecified damages, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each alleged infringement, per Storyboard18’s account of the filing. Dow Jones, the New York Post, and News Corp’s UK and Australian operations are also named as defendants in Brave’s original suit. ### the disguised crawler claim At the center of News Corp’s countersuit is an allegation that Brave’s crawlers don’t behave like a conventional search engine’s. A lawful search engine, the filing argues, “crawls publicly-available content in a manner that enables website owners to block access if they so choose, stores that content in a searchable index and delivers brief snippets – traditionally around 50 words – alongside links to the original source,” as quoted by Yahoo Finance UK. News Corp alleges Brave instead “masks its web crawlers such that publishers cannot detect or reliably block them,” then bundles “extra-long snippets of up to approximately 250 words (approximately 5 times traditional search snippets) and/or its so-called summarizer version of the content it copies” and sells that material to enterprise customers — “primarily AI companies” — through what Brave calls its “Data for AI API” business. News Corp’s filing offers its own label for that product: “theft by a masked intruder.” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson followed the filing with a statement leaning hard into that framing, calling Brave “content crooks and brand brigands” who “have shamelessly stolen and then perfidiously profited from that pilfering by illicitly fencing our journalists’ work,” per Yahoo Finance UK. “Instead of a license, they have licentiously looted with blatant disregard to the severe damage done to the information eco-system,” Thomson said, adding that “these byte burglars and bootleggers, these content contrabandists are seriously undermining the integrity of AI and IP.” News Corp’s filing also disputes Brave’s characterization of the original cease-and-desist as an attack on ordinary indexing, insisting the company has “never objected to lawful search engine activity” and that it refrained from suing sooner despite what it calls “ongoing copyright infringement,” spending over a year negotiating what it describes as a fair, market-based licensing deal before Brave “walked away and unilaterally chose litigation a second time.” ### a market with few players The fight lands in a search market that has been consolidating around a handful of independent indexes. Brave describes itself as the smallest of three search engines that operate at scale in the United States, behind Google and Microsoft’s Bing, according to Storyboard18. On its own blog, Brave has positioned its three-year-old Search API — built on what it says is an independent index of 40 billion web pages — as one of the only viable, commercially available alternatives left standing after Microsoft shut down Bing’s public API in August 2025 and Google filed suit against the scraping tool SerpApi, moves Brave’s blog calls a signal that “the days of free scraping are over.” Brave’s post argues that its own model is different from scraper-based rivals because it runs its own index rather than reselling someone else’s, and touts pricing “as low as $5 CPM” and “99.99% uptime” for its API calls — claims made by the company that are, by Brave’s own account, central to its pitch to AI developers wary of legally shaky data pipelines. ### what to watch The case will likely turn on whether Brave’s snippet lengths, summarization, and crawler behavior fall outside the fair-use protections that cover conventional search indexing — the same doctrinal fight playing out across the broader wave of publisher-versus-AI litigation. For data companies building on licensed or scraped web content, the practical stakes are the statutory damages figure itself: up to $150,000 per infringement, multiplied across whatever volume of articles a court finds were copied, is the kind of number that reshapes how AI firms and their data suppliers price licensing risk. Whether News Corp can prove Brave’s crawlers were deliberately hidden from publishers, and whether Brave can convince the Oakland court its snippets and summaries remain “a properly balanced tool of discovery” rather than substitution, will matter well beyond this one docket. > News Corp countersues Brave for allegedly 'scraping' articles for AI > — [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/news-corp-countersues-brave-allegedly-scraping-articles-ai-2026-07-22/) [Read the full story at Reuters →](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/news-corp-countersues-brave-allegedly-scraping-articles-ai-2026-07-22/) --- Cite this analysis: https://datacommenter.com/news-corp-countersues-brave-demands-up-to-150000-per-scraped-article/ Cite primary facts: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/news-corp-countersues-brave-allegedly-scraping-articles-ai-2026-07-22/ Need the underlying datasets (alt data, market data, AI training data)? 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