Elon Musk’s X case against Bright Data about data scraping is unsuccessful.

A federal judge in California has rejected a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s company, X, against Israel’s Bright Data. The issue revolved around the practice of scraping public web data and its proper utilization.

X, previously known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against Bright Data, accusing the corporation of extracting data from X and then selling it by employing sophisticated methods to avoid X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology. In addition, X said that the corporation had infringed against its terms of service and copyright.

Data scraping refers to the process of using automated algorithms to search through publically available websites and gather data. This data may then be utilized for many reasons, such as training artificial intelligence models or targeting online advertisements. Scraping publicly available data is often considered permissible in the U.S., as confirmed by a 2022 verdict that concluded a lengthy legal dispute concerning LinkedIn.

In a lawsuit filed in Dallas County, X had previously sought damages of nearly $1 million from unidentified defendants for their unauthorized collection of data related to Texas individuals.

Judge William Alsup, in his ruling, stated that X Corp. is attempting to have the benefits of safe harbors while also exercising the rights of a copyright owner to prevent others from using and copying X users’ work, and demanding money from those who seek to do so.

The court expressed concern that granting social networks full authority over the gathering and utilization of public internet data might lead to the establishment of information monopolies that would be detrimental to the public interest. He stated that X has no intention of safeguarding the privacy of X users and was willing to let the extraction and duplication of X users’ content as long as there is compensation.

A spokesperson for X did not promptly reply to a comment request.

Meta had already complained Bright Data, but unfortunately, it did not yield any positive outcome.

In an emailed statement, Bright Data asserted that its successes against Meta and X demonstrate that publicly available internet information is a collective possession, and any endeavor to restrict public access will be unsuccessful.

The corporation stated that the current situation is without precedent and its ramifications have a wide-ranging influence on general business, research, AI, and other areas.

Bright Data asserts that it exclusively collects openly accessible data that is viewable to all individuals without requiring any login credentials. At the time the lawsuit was filed, X made the information that Bright Data had collected through scraping accessible to everyone.

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