Elon Musk's X loses lawsuit against Bright Data for data scraping

A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk

X, formerly Twitter, sued Bright Data on the grounds that the corporate “Scrape Data from X” and sell it “through sophisticated technical measures to sell X's anti-scraping technology that the company had against its terms of use and its copyright violated.

Data scraping involves automated programs crawling publicly accessible websites to collect data that can later be used for a variety of purposes, including training artificial intelligence models and targeting online ads. According to a, the practice is generally legal in the United States when it comes to scraping publicly available data 2022 Judgment that concluded an extensive legal dispute with LinkedIn.

X had previously sought more than $1 million in damages from unidentified defendants for “illegal data disposal of Texas residents,” it said a suit that was filed in Dallas County.

When Judge William Alsup dismissed the lawsuit, he wrote: “X Corp. wants to do both: retain its safe havens while exercising a copyright holder's right to exclude and extract fees from those who wish to extract and copy content from X users.”

Giving social networks complete control over the collection and use of public web data “risks the creation of information monopolies that would be contrary to the public interest,” the judge wrote. He added that X was not concerned with “the privacy of

A representative for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta had previously filed a complaint against Bright Data and was also unsuccessful.

Bright Data said in an emailed statement that its victories against Meta and X show that public information on the Internet “belongs to all of us and any attempt to deny public access will fail.”

“What is happening now is unprecedented. The impact extends to broader business, research, AI and beyond,” the corporate said.

According to Bright Data, only publicly available data that’s visible to anyone and not using a login can be deleted. At the time the lawsuit was filed, X was making the data collected by Bright Data available to anyone.