Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion. (Representative)
A US judge has 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 allow others to copy and sell content, from the social media platform.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled Thursday that dodge.
William Alsup said that the use of scraping tools is not inherently fraudulent, and that giving social media companies a free hand to decide how public data is used “risks creating information monopolies that would violate the public interest .”
The judge also said that X was not entitled to “de facto copyright ownership” of copyrighted content that X’s users made available to the public.
Lawyers for X did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.
Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, said in a statement: “Bright Data’s win over
William Alsup said X may seek to amend his complaint, which sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, trespass and misappropriation. The San Francisco-based company sued Bright Data last July.
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 the lawsuit against Bright Data a month later.
In March, another San Francisco judge dismissed X’s lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which published articles based on aggregated data criticizing a rise in hate speech on the platform.
X claimed the articles deterred advertisers and cost millions of dollars, and has appealed the decision.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion. His other activities include the electric car company Tesla.
The case is X Corp v. Bright Data Ltd, US District Court, Northern District of California, No. 23-03698.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
