SoylentNews

Celestial [soylentnews.org] writes:

The battle over the Brave web browser has begun. A group of seventeen newspaper publishers (including Dow Jones, the Washington Post, and the New York Times), have sent and co-signed a "cease and desist" letter to the company behind the Brave web browser, (headed by Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla and developer of JavaScript).

... the 17 newspaper-publishing companies that cosigned the cease and desist letter sent to Eich on Thursday say that this business model is "blatantly illegal" because they claim Brave is profiting from the "$5 billion" a year the industry spends on funding journalism.

The publishers argue that Brave's advertising-replacement plan would constitute copyright infringement, a violation of the publishers' terms of use, unfair competition, unauthorized access to their sites, and a breach of contract.

The letter compares Brave's business model to a company simply stealing their articles and pasting them on their own websites for profit.

For those that don't recall the announcement of the Brave web browser,

Brendan Eich's new browser, Brave, announced its launch early this year. The browser — available on iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, and Linux — has ad-blocking software baked into it, which blocks all ads by default and replaces them with its own ads that it says load quicker and "protect data sovereignty [and] anonymity" of users by blocking tracking pixels and cookies.

With Brave, publishers get around 55% of revenues: 15% go to Brave, 15% go to the partner that serves the ads, and 10% to 15% goes back to the user, who can choose to make bitcoin donations to their favorite publishers in order to get an ad-free experience on their websites...

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