The New York Times filed suit against Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the browser company scraped its copyrighted articles and distributed them to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. A separate but similar lawsuit was filed the same day by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. The complaints also cite a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and its practice of blocking publishers' ads while inserting its own.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-11-02
A federal judge has ordered Meta to disclose the names of employees who authorized the company's use of torrenting to download materials from shadow libraries Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, reportedly used to train its AI models. The ruling emerges from ongoing litigation over Meta's data-sourcing practices for AI training.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-21
A federal magistrate judge has ordered Meta to disclose which executives and managers authorized the torrenting of books from shadow libraries like Anna's Archive and LibGen for AI training data. The ruling, reported by TorrentFreak, affects a class action from authors including Sarah Silverman and Richard Kadrey, as well as a separate suit from Entrepreneur Media. Meta had argued the downloading occurred through an informal process with no clear decision-maker, a characterization the court rejected.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-20
Meta had updated its commercial terms of use to state it could use content from a business account's domains and URLs to develop, train and maintain its products. Legal experts cited by Nieman Lab warned this broad wording could let Meta scrape publisher websites for AI training, prompting the company to remove the provision after The Verge reported on the controversy.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-17
Court documents in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, which pulled in Microsoft as OpenAI's top investor, quote Microsoft director Brent Hecht warning that AI systems are undermining the very publishers whose content trains them. CEO Satya Nadella separately acknowledged that chatbot conversations often replace visits to original source websites, cutting off traffic publishers depend on.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-19
Newly unredacted court documents from copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal comments from executives acknowledging that scraping published journalism to train chatbots amounted to theft on a massive scale. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly described it as possibly 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while an OpenAI executive warned that products like ChatGPT posed an 'existential threat' to publishers.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unredacted court documents from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit reveal Microsoft's Dr. Brent Hecht warned that OpenAI's training practices resembled the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Nick Turley called it an 'existential threat to publishers.' The filings also detail how OpenAI's training pipeline bypassed paywalls and stripped copyright notices from scraped articles used to build its datasets.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal remarks from Microsoft's Brent Hecht, who predicted the public would eventually see large language model training as unprecedented theft of labor. The filing also cites OpenAI's Greg Brockman acknowledging that ChatGPT can reproduce and complete sentences from NYT articles verbatim.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-18
A newly unsealed filing in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals internal communications showing employees at both companies recognized their AI tools could jeopardize the publishers whose content trains them. The filing suggests executives were aware of this risk even as they continued developing and deploying the technology.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-17
Newly unsealed court documents from The New York Times-led copyright lawsuit reveal internal Microsoft and OpenAI communications acknowledging the risks of scraping news content for AI training. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly called the practice possibly the 'largest theft of labor in human history' and undermined the companies' own fair-use defense, while OpenAI's Nick Turley warned that AI products could pose an 'existential threat' to publishers.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-17
Newly unredacted court documents in The New York Times' copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal that a senior Microsoft executive privately labeled the companies' AI training practices as theft, while OpenAI leaders reportedly acknowledged their models posed an existential threat to publishers. The filings also allege the companies bypassed paywalls, scraped content en masse, and removed copyright notices to build training datasets.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
A plaintiff calling himself Matthew Schneider sued private torrent trackers including PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet and HDBits, claiming they infringed his copyrighted films while seeking to unmask their operators via Cloudflare. The real filmmaker who made the cited films swore he had no connection to the case, and after being pressed to explain, the plaintiff voluntarily dropped the lawsuit rather than clarify the discrepancy.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-15
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