Judge dismisses X's web scraping case against Bright Data

NEW YORK, May 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Thursday a federal judge dismissed a suit X brought against Bright Data, a public web data company, reaffirming that public web data does not belong to one entity and is available for public use.

This legal victory has a profound impact on web scraping for the collection of public web data and consequently the necessary uses in all business sectors, research, and development of AI models.

In throwing out all claims against Bright Data, U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote that giving social media companies free rein of the collection and use of public web data, "risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest."    

In February, a judge came to a similar outcome in the lawsuit Meta brought against Bright Data. These lawsuits are a pattern that targets scraping companies, individuals, and nonprofits. Lawsuits are used as a monetary weapon to discourage collecting public data from sites so conglomerates can hoard user-generated public data.

"Bright Data's victories over Meta (Facebook) and X (Twitter) from the past year make it clear to the world that public information on the web belongs to all of us, and any attempt to deny the public access will fail. These lawsuits and the following rulings in favor of web scraping will have positive implications for society, innovation, research, AI, and beyond," said Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data.

The X and Meta suits are monumental for the public good and free markets while laying the groundwork for unified responsible scraping guidelines.

There have been a number of unsuccessful cases in web scraping that resulted in permanent bans from both Meta and X, in which scraping was not defined as public or done unethically. Bright Data only scrapes publicly available data, which is visible to anyone without a login. At the time of the suit's filing, X had made the information Bright Data scraped available to anyone on the Internet.

Bright Data continually builds upon its scraping ethics. Recently it launched Bright Shield, a product that ensures data collection is compliant. Coupled with explicit guidelines and rules for users of Bright Data's services, this complaint way of scraping is widely accepted as a general need across industries.

About Bright Data
Bright Data is the #1 public web data platform. More than 20,000 customers from Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, non-profits, and small businesses rely on Bright Data's solutions to retrieve and analyze web data in the most efficient, reliable, and flexible way so they can make faster, more informed business-critical decisions.

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SOURCE Bright Data Ltd.