California judge dismisses data scraping lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X

X lost a lawsuit it filed against Bright Data, claiming it scraped data in spite of X’s anti-scraping tech, and violated the platform’s Terms of Service

The legal decision also highlighted how X treated the data of its own users and monetised the same [File] | Photo Credit: AP

A California judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk-owned X against the data-scraping company Bright Data, in which X claimed that the company violated its Terms of Service and evaded its platform’s safeguards.

In a filing this month, the judge noted that X’s interpretation and treatment of U.S. copyright laws differed significantly from the way Congress interpreted the same, meaning that X’s arguments did not hold up well in court.

“The upshot is that, invoking state contract and tort law, X Corp. would entrench its own private copyright system that rivals, even conflicts with, the actual copyright system enacted by Congress. 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,” noted the filing.

Furthermore, the judge observed that X did not allege that Bright Data used an X account in order to scrape X’s data, and that “violating X Corp.’s Terms does not itself state a claim for trespass or fraud.”

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The filing noted that X did not allege server harm, user impersonation, or damage due to access, which are some conditions required for state claims of breach of contract.

Furthermore, the legal decision also highlighted how X treated the data of its own users and monetised the same, in spite of raising concerns about user privacy.

“X Corp. is happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ content so long as it gets paid,” noted Judge William Alsup in the filing, and gave X time to file an amended motion in the coming weeks.

Musk has in the past reacted emotionally to the idea of X data being scraped, accusing Microsoft and OpenAI of doing so in order to train their AI models.

As a result, the social media platform at one time restricted user activity and has also prevented people from viewing its content in full unless they create an account.