At ¥150, open-source, and modifiable, it precisely lowers the barrier to the level where ordinary enthusiasts can experiment and iterate. Whether it becomes a viable business is irrelevant—what matters is that such small-scale hardware will proliferate, and the next breakout hit will most likely emerge from solving one specific, tangible friction point
Four Practical Countermeasures PerplexityBased on the conclusions of this experiment, I summarize four actionable rules:Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s output
Document your initial hypothesis and metric selection with a timestamp. Experiments show this doesn’t fully prevent influence—but at least lets you see later what changed in your thinking
Require the Agent to present the strongest arguments for both sidesThe defendant is not OpenAI, nor is ita browser company. This detail is precisely what makes the entire case truly interesting:In the AI training data supply chain, there sits an almost invisible middleman layer—beyond the model companies themselves..
Core allegation in the complaint: “Thief” plus “AI fence”
- The New York Times’ wording is even harsher than in its lawsuit against OpenAI. The complaint describes Brave as “a supplier, distributor, and dealer of stolen copyrighted content,” stating verbatim: Brave is botha thief that steals publishers’ contentandan “AI fence” that resells stolen content to third parties
- Specific allegations broken down into four points:Indexing of 3+ billion web pagesPerplexity、Mistral、xAI、Cohere。
- Four Practical CountermeasuresBased on the findings of this experiment, I summarize four actionable rules:
- Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s outputDocument your initial hypothesis and metric selection with a timestamp. Experiments show this won’t fully prevent influence, but at least lets you see what changed in retrospect
Require the Agent to present the strongest arguments for both sides
Bypass paywalls
The Brave browser has a feature that bypasses publishers’ paywallsBlock publisher ads and sell your own ads.
Monetize publisher traffic while cutting off the publisher’s monetization path PerplexityThe New York Times seeks an injunction and damages. Brave was founded in 2015 and has raised approximately $250 million in funding to dateWhy is Brave the defendant—not the AI companies?This is a classic move in copyright litigation:
Target the supply chain first, then the end user
Suing model companies directly invites a “fair use” defense; courts must assess whether training constitutes transformative use—a lengthy, highly uncertain process. The New York Times is already suing OpenAI and Four actionable countermeasuresBased on the findings of this experiment, I summarize four practical, implementable rules: Delegating tasks to AI agents saves operational time—but at the cost of significantly reduced behavioral predictability. Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s output Document your initial assumptions and metric selections with timestamps. Experiments show this won’t fully prevent influence—but at least lets you see what changed in hindsightRequire the Agent to present the strongest arguments for both sides
Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic
pushing the music copyright battlefield into the multi-billion-dollar range; and
Such procedural conflicts also signal that copyright litigation has entered the evidence-gathering and adversarial phase. Content-side confrontation is escalating in parallel: research showsOver one-third of web content published since ChatGPT’s launch is AI-generatedand the scarcity of human-original content is being repriced.
Real-world impact on three groups
Content sites and independent bloggersThe most direct insight:Stop relying on robots.txt for protection
general users
If the crawler doesn’t identify itself, you don’t even know who to refuse. Three viable defensive actions are: implementing UA and behavioral fingerprinting at the Cloudflare or WAF layer—not just robots.txt alone; placing core content behind login walls or APIs; and using content-fingerprinting tools to periodically check whether your articles appear in AI product responses.Four Actionable CountermeasuresBased on the findings of this experiment, I summarize four practical and actionable rules:ChatGPT Launches Visual Ads,Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s outputDocument your initial hypothesis and metric selection with a timestamp. Experiments show this doesn’t fully prevent influence, but at least lets you see what changed in retrospect
Require the Agent to provide the strongest arguments for both sides
Content creators who aren’t paid will exit
Similar monetization anxiety has already surfaced at the advertising layer—
26% of responses contain sponsored contentAll involve reallocation of revenue along the same value chain.Brave’s potential defenses—and the true stakes of this case
Brave’s plausible defense centers on: indexing being a necessary search-engine technology; publicly accessible web pages being inherently crawlable; its search product delivering only links and summaries to users—a transformative use; and its paywall-bypassing functionality requiring users’ own subscriptions. AI Model Libraryor use Tool Comparison Engine Yet the “distribution to five AI companies” claim is difficult to justify under the “search engine” rationale—search is for human consumption, whereas distribution to model companies is for machine ingestion, representing a fundamentally different business model. If the court determines Brave functions as a content distributor rather than a search engine on this point, it would bear direct infringement liability as an intermediary.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The true stakes are:
Whether the gray channel of “web crawling” will be judicially shut downPerplexityShutting it down would immediately raise AI data costs, hitting small-model companies first; leaving it open means publishers will continue suing one by one, imposing a long-term legal tax.
Four Practical Countermeasures
Based on the findings of this experiment, I summarize four actionable rules:
Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s output
Document your initial hypothesis and metric selection with a timestamp. Experiments show this won’t fully prevent influence, but it will at least let you see what changed in hindsight
Require the Agent to present the strongest arguments for both sides simultaneously
How does this lawsuit differ from the case against OpenAI?
Summarize
Suing OpenAI requires debating whether training data falls under “fair use”—a legally uncertain area; suing Brave follows a traditional copyright infringement path—alleging direct copying and resale of content itself, bypassing AI-training-specific arguments and enabling more straightforward evidence collectionHow can websites prevent content scraping by such crawlers?robots.txt is ineffective against anonymous crawlers. Viable measures include: UA and behavioral detection at the WAF/CDN layer; rate-limiting or challenge-based verification for high-frequency scraping; placing core content behind login walls or APIs; and periodically checking for AI product paraphrasing of your articles using content fingerprinting
Lock in your own judgment before reviewing the Agent’s outputIf publishers win, will AI products degrade? · Short-term impact may be higher prices rather than lower quality: model companies would need to license data, passing costs onto subscriptions or ads. Long-term, a willing-to-pay licensing ecosystem could actually stabilize high-quality content supply · This isn’t just another “media vs. AI” lawsuit. It’s the first to target an intermediary at the crawling layer—and it zeroes in on a technically indefensible point: nameless crawlersRegardless of the verdict, the era of “scrape web pages freely” is ending AI Model Library.
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