Data Scraping | Data Crawling

Data Scraping Legal Battle: X Corp. vs. Bright Data Ltd.

No harm, no lawsuit

Elon Musk’s company, X Corp (aka Twitter), filed a lawsuit against an Israeli company called Bright Data. X Corp accused Bright Data of illegally scrapping and selling information from its social media platform. They also claimed that Bright Information was selling tools that let others do the same thing.

However, last week on May 09, 2024, U.S. Senior District Judge William Alsup decided to dismiss the lawsuit. He stated that X Corp did not convincingly show that Bright Data broke any rules set by the user agreement on the platform. Judge Alsup also mentioned that using tools to collect data (scraping) isn’t necessarily illegal or fraudulent. He expressed concern that letting social media companies have too much control over public data could lead to “information monopolies”, which would not be good for the public.

The judge also pointed out that X Corp does not automatically own the rights to content just because it’s posted on their platform by users.

Bright Data’s CEO, Or Lenchner, responded by saying that this legal victory confirms that information available publicly online should be accessible to everyone, and attempts to restrict this access are likely to fail.

The judge has allowed X Corp to revise and submit their complaint again if they choose to do so.