Musk's X Corp loses lawsuit against Israeli data-scraping company

 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."

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.

- CyberBeat