In less than a month, Brave Software plans to open a bitcoin wallet on behalf of major content creators around the world so those publishers can receive micropayments in exchange for viewing specially curated ads.
Launched in 2015, Brave has raised $2.5m from private investors to build a browser that automatically blocks ads and gives users the option to replace some of those ads with those of Brave’s partners as part of a revenue share program that pays both the content creator and the reader.
The problem is, many of the biggest publishers in the US, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, want nothing to do with it.
On 7th April, the Newspaper Association of America published a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of those companies addressed to Brave’s CEO Brendan Eich, and threatened legal action if he continued to build his product.
Representatives of 1,200 members Newspaper Association of America posted the 1,000-word letter directly to the site, describing Brave’s business model as "indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website". The publishers threatened legal action if Eich continued his work.
But in a conversation with CoinDesk, Eich said that not only has he not given up hope on someday working with those very same publishers, but that his plans to create bitcoin wallets on their behalf are unchanged.
Eich said: "We’ll try to get it set up so that people who have bitcoin can transfer it into the wallets we create and will be able to micropay for an ad-free experience. That’s independent of this ad-replacement idea and the legalities there of. We’re full steam ahead on that." The co-founder of Mozilla, and creator of the JavaScript programming language, Eich said he never actually received the letter from the Newspaper Association […]
