A U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Elon Musk's X Corp accused an Israeli data-scraping company of illegally copying and selling content, and selling tools that let others copy and sell content, from the social media platform.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled on
Thursday that X, formerly Twitter, failed to plausibly allege that Bright Data
Ltd violated its user agreement by allowing the scraping and evading X's own
anti-scraping technology.
Alsup said using scraping tools is not inherently
fraudulent, and giving social media companies free rein to decide how public
data are used "risks the possible creation of information monopolies that
would disserve the public interest."
The judge also said X was not entitled to "de facto
copyright ownership" in copyrighted content that X's users made available
to the public.
Lawyers for X did not immediately respond on Friday to
requests for comment.
Or Lenchner, Bright Data's chief executive, said in a
statement: "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."
Alsup said X can try to amend its complaint, which sought
unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, trespass
and misappropriation. The San Francisco-based company sued Bright Data last
July.
In January, another San Francisco judge ruled that Bright
Data had not violated Meta Platforms' terms of service by scraping data from
Facebook and Instagram. Meta ended its lawsuit against Bright Data a month
later.
Then in March, another San Francisco judge dismissed X's
lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which
published articles based on scraped data that faulted a rise in hate speech on
the platform.
X claimed that the articles were scaring away advertisers,
costing it millions of dollars, and has appealed the decision.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. His
other businesses include electric car company Tesla.
The case is X Corp v Bright Data Ltd, U.S. District Court,
Northern District of California, No. 23-03698.