FILE PHOTO: A little girl runs in a shaft of light at the entrance to the News Corp. Building in the Midtown section of New York City, U.S., November 30, 2023. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
(Reuters) -News Corp has been sued by Google search engine rival Brave Software, which seeks to forestall a lawsuit by Rupert Murdoch's company for when readers are directed to copyrighted articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
In a Wednesday night complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, Brave said News Corp sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening litigation and demanding compensation for the alleged misappropriation of copyrighted articles by "scraping" its websites and indexing their content.
Brave countered that it is "fair use" to index website content, "which all search engine operators must do to exist."
It also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt advances in generative artificial intelligence, saying chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini rely on search engine responses.
Brave, based in San Francisco, said its Brave Search has less than 1% of the search market, with Google commanding nearly 90% and Microsoft's Bing much of the rest.
"Defendants, which partner with Google, seek to bully Brave out of the market and push the market's already-high barriers to entry infinitely higher," Brave said.
News Corp's British, Australian and Dow Jones operations are also defendants.
Robert Thomson, News Corp's chief executive, in a statement rejected Brave's accusations, accusing the company of disguising its "piratical, parasitical practices" as traditional search.
"The unauthorised scraping and reselling of our copyrighted content to AI engines and other Brave customers is blatant abuse, not fair use," Thomson said. "It is perverse in the extreme that a company that bemusingly calls itself Brave should engage in content conduct that is so shiftily shameful."
Brave's lawsuit joined the intensifying battle pitting publishers against technology companies that want to use copyrighted content without authorization to support AI.
News Corp sued the startup Perplexity AI in October for alleged "massive" illegal copying of its articles.
In its February 27 cease-and-desist letter, News Corp said Brave "monetizes its widescale theft of intellectual property by selling the purloined content to some of the very same tech companies it publicly derides.
"In so doing, Brave harms content creators, including the innumerable journalists, editors, and other staff responsible for producing high-quality content," News Corp added.
Brave's lawsuit seeks a declaration that using copyrighted News Corp articles that can be bundled into search indexes that can be licensed and sold is not copyright infringement.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New YorkEditing by Marguerita Choy and Aurora Ellis)
