Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Omar Marques | getty images
A federal judge in California has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against Israel’s Bright Data in a case involving the scraping and appropriate use of public online data.
X (formerly Twitter) sued Bright Data, alleging that the company “scraped data from X” and sold it “using sophisticated technical measures to circumvent X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology.” X also alleged that the company violated its terms of service and copyright.
Data scraping occurs when automated programs scour publicly accessible websites to collect data. This data can later be used for a wide range of purposes, including training artificial intelligence models and targeting online ads. This practice, which involves scraping publicly accessible data, is generally legal in the United States, according to a 2022 ruling that settled an extended legal battle involving LinkedIn.
According to the case filed in Dallas County,
In dismissing the complaint, Judge William Alsup wrote, ” “It will,” he wrote.
The judge wrote that giving social networks complete control over the collection and use of public web data “risks creating an information monopoly that undermines the public interest.” He added that X “makes no attempt to protect the privacy of X users.” “I’m happy to allow you to extract and copy user X’s content as long as you get paid.”
A representative for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
meta We have previously filed complaints against Bright Data, but were similarly unsuccessful.
Bright Data said in an emailed statement that its victories over Meta and
“What is happening now is unprecedented, and its impact impacts general business, research, AI and beyond,” the company said.
Bright Data says it only scrapes publicly available data that anyone can view without logging in. At the time the lawsuit was filed, X had disclosed information scraped by Bright Data to anyone.
see: Elon Musk on X Subscriptions
