The complaint
Daily News, LP; Chicago Tribune Company, LLC; and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09554 (S.D.N.Y.), is a 69-page complaint dated and filed November 2, 2026, ECF No. 1, with a jury demand. The complaint describes Brave as a closely held Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California.
The plaintiffs and their works
The complaint alleges that the Daily News owns over 9,000 registered newspaper issues containing over 500,000 articles (Exhibit A), the Chicago Tribune owns over 15,000 registered issues containing over 1.2 million articles (Exhibit B), and the Orlando Sentinel owns over 8,500 registered issues containing over 400,000 articles (Exhibit C). It describes the Daily News as a Delaware limited partnership with offices in New York, and the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel companies as Delaware limited liability companies based in Illinois and Florida.
What it alleges about Brave's products
The publishers allege that Brave built a search index by crawling and copying billions of websites without identifying its crawler, and that its Ask Brave feature answers queries by passing content from the index to a large language model through retrieval augmented generation. They allege that Brave sells access to the index to other AI companies through the Brave Search API for training and for answering user queries. They also allege that the Brave Browser has a setting called Paywall blocker, promoted as letting users bypass paywalls, and built-in ad blocking that replaces publishers' ads with Brave's own. The complaint includes side-by-side comparisons of Ask Brave responses with Daily News and Chicago Tribune articles, and Exhibit D gives the full comparison for one Chicago Tribune article.
The five counts
Count I pleads direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501. It alleges, on information and belief, that Brave willfully copied as many of the publishers' articles as it could reach with its own or third parties' web crawlers into indexes used for retrieval augmented generation, and that Brave's answers, its API sales, and the browser's access to paywalled articles each infringe the exclusive rights in 17 U.S.C. § 106. It cites the paywall bypass setting and Brave's refusal to name its crawler as signs of willfulness.
Count II pleads contributory infringement and Count III pleads vicarious infringement, based on the use of Brave's products by its users and by AI companies. Count IV pleads violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and § 1201(a)(2), alleging that Brave circumvented the publishers' paywalls and other technological measures and trafficked in a tool designed to do so. Count V pleads unjust enrichment under New York law based only on Brave's replacement of the publishers' advertising with its own ads, and the complaint says that count does not depend on any copying.
The publishers ask for statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction, costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees, and other relief the court finds just.