By Jonathan Stempel
July 21 (Reuters) - News Corp, facing a lawsuit by search engine Brave Software, has filed a countersuit accusing it of "flagrant theft" in distributing and selling versions of articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Post to AI companies.
Brave had last year preemptively sued the media giant, seeking a court declaration that its practices were legal. It sued after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from News Corp, which is led by the family of Rupert Murdoch.
In a Tuesday filing in the Oakland, California, federal court, News Corp said Brave's unauthorized "covert scraping" and resale of its copyrighted articles fall "nowhere near the bounds" of legally acceptable conduct known as fair use.
"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," the lawsuit said. "Brave profits while publishers are cut out."
News Corp is seeking an injunction and unspecified monetary damages, plus damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.
Brave and its lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
The competing lawsuits are part of a wave of litigation pitting publishers against technology companies that want to use copyrighted content to support AI.
BRAVE ACCUSED NEWS CORP OF DISRUPTING AI
Brave sued News Corp in March 2025, seeking a court declaration that bundling copyrighted articles that can be licensed and sold is not copyright infringement.
It filed a revised complaint in May 2026, following what News Corp called failed negotiations for a "fair, market-based agreement."
Brave has argued that its indexing of News Corp content to make it searchable, and providing users with snippets and "high-level summaries" of that content, amounted to fair use.
The San Francisco-based company also accused News Corp of threatening to disrupt advances in generative AI, which it said many consider "the most important innovation so far this century."
BRAVE ACCUSED OF 'TACKY TECH TRAFFICKING'
News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said in a statement that Brave's looting of his company's content reflected "blatant disregard" for the damage to how information is disseminated.
"This era of tacky tech trafficking must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future," Thomson said.
Brave has said it is the smallest of the three U.S.-based companies to operate independent search engines "at scale."
Google dominates that market, followed by Microsoft, which operates Bing.
The New York Post, Dow Jones and News Corp's British and Australian operations are also defendants in Brave's lawsuit.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)