Judge dismisses X case against data-scraping firm Bright Data
This is the second victory in three months for the Israeli company against a technology giant, after Meta abandoned a similar lawsuit it filed against Bright Data in February
A federal court in California on Thursday outright dismissed the lawsuit filed by X (formerly Twitter) against Israeli company Bright Data, ruling that X failed to prove its claims of breach of contract. This is the second victory in the last three months for the Israeli company against a technology giant, after Meta abandoned a similar lawsuit it filed against Bright Data in February.
Last July, Elon Musk's X sued Bright Data, alleging that the company extracted and sold records of millions of users on the social media platform in violation of the terms of use. Bright Data specializes in business intelligence based on collecting and processing publicly available information on the web. The company's work procedure includes the massive collection of information from personal profiles on social networks - a practice known as scraping.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claimed that “Bright Data scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.’s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.’s terms of service.
“Bright Data also induces and facilitates other X users to violate their own agreements with X Corp. by selling automated data-scraping tools and services that specifically target a wide range of X Corp. data.”
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However, on Thursday, the court rejected the lawsuit outright, ruling that none of the claims made by X in the lawsuit justify the continuation of the trial and that there are legal precedents that allow Bright Data's activities. “Our court of appeals has held that giving social media companies ‘free rein to decide, on any basis, who can collect and use data — data that the companies do not own, that they otherwise make publicly available to viewers, and that the companies themselves collect and use — risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest’,” Judge U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in his decision.
Among other things, the judge rejected X's claims that the sale of data scraping tools is tantamount to fraud, that Bright Data violated a contract with X, and determined that the violation of the terms of use by the Israeli company is not tantamount to trespass or fraud. In addition, the court determined that X's attempt to claim copyright on user information is inconsistent with the law.
“X Corp. would yank into its private domain and hold for sale information open to all, exercising a copyright owner’s right to exclude where it has no such right,” the judge wrote. “In addition to giving itself de facto copyright ownership in copyrighted content that X users designated for public use, X Corp. would give itself de facto copyright ownership over content that Congress declined to extend copyright protection to in the first place.”
In January of this year, the court rejected similar claims made by Meta in its lawsuit against Bright Data and ruled, among other things, that the company did not violate the terms of use of Facebook and Instagram. In February, following this decision, Meta announced that it was abandoning the lawsuit.
