US Judge throws out X's case against Israeli data scraping firm

Elon Musk's X Corp suffered a legal defeat as a San Francisco judge dismissed its lawsuit against the Israeli data-scraping company, Bright Data Ltd, which was alleged to have copied content from the site and selling it.

The lawsuit that alleged that the company also provided tools for others to do the same, failed to garner sufficient evidence according to US District Judge William Alsup.

Specifically, the judge found that X Corp did not adequately demonstrate that Bright Data had violated its user agreement or circumvented X's anti-scraping measures, reported Reuters.

Alsup said using scraping tools isn't always wrong, and letting social media companies control public data use could lead to information monopolies, which wouldn't be good for the public.

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.

X Corp. is an American technology company established by Elon Musk in 2023 as the successor to Twitter. Bright Data is an Israeli technology company that offers web data collection and proxy services to B2B companies. The company's headquarters are located in Israel, with an additional office in New York.

Or Lenchner, Bright Data's chief executive, said, "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, which had sued Bright Data last July, can try to change its complaint, which asked for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breaking their agreement and other wrongs.

In January this year, another San Francisco judge said Bright Data didn't break Meta Platforms' rules by taking data from Facebook and Instagram. Meta dropped its lawsuit against Bright Data a month later.

In March, another San Francisco judge threw out X's lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which wrote articles using scraped data criticising an increase in hateful speech on the platform.

X said the articles were scaring advertisers, making it lose millions of dollars. They've asked for the decision to be looked at again.