Elon Musk's X Lawsuit Against Bright Data For Data Scraping Ends In Defeat

A lawsuit brought by Elon Musk's X against Israel's Bright Data, concerning the scraping of public online data and its proper utilisation, has been dismissed by a federal judge in California.

X, formerly Twitter, sued Bright Data, alleging the company “scrapes data from X” and sells it “using elaborate technical measures to evade X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology.”

X also alleged that the company had breached its terms of service and infringed on its copyright.

Data scraping happens when automated software searches publicly available websites to gather information, which can subsequently serve various purposes such as training artificial intelligence models or directing online advertisements.

While dismissing the complaint, the judge wrote, “X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbors yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wrestling fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.”

The judge added that X was not “looking to protect X users’ privacy,” and was “happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ content so long as it gets paid.”