Elon Musk’s X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, faced a setback as a U.S. District Judge in San Francisco dismissed its lawsuit against Israeli data-scraping company Bright Data Ltd.
The lawsuit alleged that Bright Data illegally copied and sold content from the social media platform and provided tools for others to do the same.
In his ruling delivered on Thursday, Judge William Alsup emphasised that X Corp failed to provide sufficient evidence of Bright Data Ltd violating its user agreement. Alsup clarified that using scraping tools, while contentious, does not inherently constitute fraud.
He cautioned against granting social media companies unchecked authority over the use of public data.
Furthermore, Judge Alsup rejected X Corp’s “de facto copyright ownership” claim over user-generated content made available to the public.
In response to the dismissal, lawyers representing X Corp did not immediately comment. However, Or Lenchner, Chief Executive of Bright Data, welcomed the decision, asserting that public information on the web belongs to everyone.
“Bright Data’s victory over X makes it clear to the world that public information on the web belongs to all of us, and any attempt to deny the public access will fail”, he stated.
Despite the dismissal, X Corp has been granted the opportunity to revise its complaint, seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, trespass, and misappropriation.
X Corp initially filed the lawsuit against Bright Data in July 2023. The case was officially recorded as X Corp v Bright Data Ltd in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, under case number 23-03698.
This legal dispute concerning data scraping is not isolated to X Corp. In similar cases, other social media giants have faced legal challenges against data-scraping companies. Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) withdrew its lawsuit against Bright Data after a San Francisco judge ruled in favour of the data-scraping company.
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