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A federal judge in California has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against Israel’s Bright Data over the scraping of public online material and its appropriate use.
X (formerly Twitter) sued Bright Data, accusing the company of “scraping data from X” and “using sophisticated technical measures to evade X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology” and selling it. X also claimed that the company violated its terms of service and copyright.
Data extraction occurs when automated programs search publicly accessible websites to collect data, which can then be used for a variety of purposes, including training artificial intelligence models and targeting online advertising. According to one public source, this practice, which involves scraping publicly accessible data, is generally legal in the United States. 2022 The ruling ends a long-running legal battle involving LinkedIn.
X is reportedly seeking more than $1 million from unidentified defendants for “illegally stealing data related to Texas residents.” casewhich was filed in Dallas County.
In dismissing the complaint, Judge William Alsup wrote, “Company
Giving social networks complete control over the collection and use of public Internet data “may create an information monopoly that would harm the public interest,” the judge wrote. He added that X does not “want to protect X user’s privacy” and is “happy to allow the extraction and copying of X user’s content for a fee.”
Representatives for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yuan Complaints were previously lodged against Bright Data but were also unsuccessful.
Bright Data said in an emailed statement that its victory over Meta and X demonstrates that online public information “belongs to all of us and any attempt to deny public access will fail.”
“What is happening now is unprecedented, and its impact affects general business, research, artificial intelligence and more,” the company said.
Bright Data says it will only crawl public data that anyone can see without logging in. In filing the lawsuit, X made the information scraped by Bright Data available to anyone.
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