Elon Musk's X Corp, formerly Twitter, saw its lawsuit against an Israeli data-scraping firm, Bright Data Ltd, dismissed by a US judge in San Francisco.
Elon Musk's X Loses in Lawsuit Against Bright Data
According to a report by Reuters, the lawsuit alleges that Bright Data engaged in illegal copying, selling, and enabling the copying and sale of content from Twitter without authorization.
US District Judge William Alsup ruled that X failed to demonstrate that Bright Data violated its user agreement or engaged in fraudulent activities by allowing scraping activities.
Judge Alsup emphasized that scraping tools themselves are not inherently fraudulent and warned against granting social media companies exclusive control over public data, which could lead to what he terms "information monopolies."
'De Facto Copyright Ownership'
The judge also noted that X did not have "de facto copyright ownership" over the content its users shared on the platform.
In response to the dismissal, Bright Data's CEO, Or Lenchner, highlighted the importance of public access to web-based information and asserted that attempts to restrict such access would not succeed.
Bright Data claims only to gather publicly accessible data that anyone can view without requiring a login. When the lawsuit was filed, X made the information scraped by Bright Data accessible to everyone.
Despite the lawsuit's dismissal, X retains the opportunity to revise its complaint, which originally sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for alleged breach of contract, trespass, and misappropriation.
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