Elon Musk’s X loses lawsuit against Bright Data over data scraping

A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against Israel’s Bright Data, which entailed the scraping of public online data and its proper use.

X, previously Twitter, has sued Bright Data, claiming that the business “scrapes data from X” and sells it “using elaborate technical measures to evade X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology.” X also alleged the corporation had breached its terms of service and copyright.

Data scraping is when automated programs trawl publically accessible websites to collect information that can then be utilized for a variety of purposes, such as training artificial intelligence models and targeting online adverts. Scraping publicly accessible data is usually permissible in the United States, according to a 2022 verdict that ended a lengthy court struggle involving LinkedIn.

X was previously seeking more than $1 million in damages from unnamed defendants for “unlawfully scraping data associated with Texas residents,” according to a Dallas County lawsuit.

In dismissing the complaint, Judge William Alsup noted, “X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbors yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.”

Giving social networks unlimited authority over the collecting and use of public online data “risks the formation of information monopolies that would be detrimental to the public interest,” the court ruled. He stated that X was not “looking to protect X users’ privacy,” but rather “happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ content so long as it gets paid.”

A spokesperson from X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Meta previously filed a complaint against Bright Data, but was unsuccessful.

Bright Data stated in an emailed statement that its victories over Meta and X demonstrate that public information online “belongs to all of us, and any attempt to deny the public access will fail.”

“What is happening now is unprecedented, the implications impact general business, research, AI and beyond,” the business stated.

Bright Data claims it exclusively scrapes publicly available data that is accessible to anybody without a login. At the time the lawsuit was filed, X made the information that Bright Data scraped public to anyone.