A federal judge in California reportedly dismissed a lawsuit for breach-of-contract and tort claims brought by Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, against Bright Data, in a case involving data scraping.
X reportedly alleged that Bright Data was taking data from its platform and selling it, employing methods to evade X’s anti-scraping technology, and violating its terms of service and copyright.
Data scraping is the process of extracting large volumes of data from publicly available web sources. The data is cleaned and prepared for processing and can serve several purposes such as training artificial intelligence models, targeting online advertisements, or conducting market research.
According to X, Bright Data was going to elaborate measures to evade its anti-scraping technology, and in doing so, violated X’s user agreement.
While data-scraping is controversial, the judge cautioned of the potential information monopoly and the disservice to the public if social media companies were to enjoy an unchecked authority over the use of public data. Ultimately, the judge rejected X’s argument of de facto copyright ownership over user-generated content made available to the public.
Bright Data CEO, Or Lenchner, reportedly made the following statement after hearing the decision: “Bright Data has proven that ethical and transparent scraping practices for legitimate business use and social good initiatives are legally sound. Companies that try to control user data intended for public consumption will not win this legal battle.”
Authors: Kasia Donovan and Hannah Lee, 2024 Summer Student-At-Law
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