SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Social media platform X cannot pursue civil claims against a data scraping company as it failed to prove a breach of contract and other claims, and cannot circumvent the Copyright Act, a federal judge found Thursday.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed X’s suit against data-scraping company Bright Data, saying that social media companies already have legal precedent to decide who can collect and use data they do not own and make publicly available to viewers.
He threw out all of X’s claims — including for trespass, misappropriation and unjust enrichment and tortious interference and breach of contract — saying that what the platform wanted "risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest."
Attorneys for both parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
X, formerly known as Twitter, sued Bright Data in July 2023. It sought an order to bar the company from extracting and copying public data from its social media platform, and from selling tools allowing others to copy public data — while it sells its own tools enabling people to extract that data.
Bright Data moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and failure to state a claim. The company said in a Jan. 17 motion for summary judgment that X cannot prohibit it from searching public information on its site.
“X says it can contractually block any public web search it does not like simply by posting a link to its terms at the bottom of its web page,” Bright Data said. “It cannot. Contract law enforces agreements, not one-sided demands. That requires mutual assent and bargained-for consideration. X cannot establish either.”
The judge in a 26-page order Thursday denied the motion for summary judgment as moot due after finding X’s breach-of-contract claim suitable for dismissal. But he seemed to agree with Bright Data.
“The law allows X Corp. to undertake reasonable measures to protect its possession," Alsup wrote. "But the use and sale of scraping tools and services is not inherently fraudulent barring allegations that a misrepresentation has, in fact, occurred.”
The judge rejected Bright Data’s argument that X didn’t properly claim that enforceable third-party contracts exist. He said the company did not offer any reason to believe it never sold data scraping tools used to take X’s data.
However, he said, X did not plausibly claim Bright Data interfered with the their contract. Alsup pointed out that in court, X attorneys admitted they did not know how much so-called intrusion from Bright Data users took place. Violating X Corp.’s terms does not itself state a claim for trespass or fraud, Alsup said.
X seeks to exclude other parties from using, reproducing or distributing users’ content, which is already not permissible by under the Copyright Act.
“One might ask why X Corp. does not just acquire ownership of X users’ content or grant itself an exclusive license under the terms,” Alsup said. “That would jeopardize X Corp.’s safe harbors from civil liability for publishing third-party content.”
By invoking state contract and tort law, X would entrench its private copyright system that “rivals, even conflicts with, the actual copyright system enacted by Congress,” Alsup said. He said that X wants to use "a massive regime of adhesive terms that stands to fundamentally alter the rights and privileges of the world at large (or at least hundreds of millions of alleged X users).”
“X Corp. would yank into its private domain and hold for sale information open to all, exercising a copyright owner’s right to exclude where it has no such right,” the judge wrote. Therefore, he added, X’s state law claims based on scraping and selling of data undermine the purpose and intended effects of the Copyright Act to balance what what copyright owners do or do not own, and would shrink the public domain.
“In addition to giving itself de facto copyright ownership in copyrighted content that X users designated for public use, X Corp. would give itself de facto copyright ownership over content that Congress declined to extend copyright protection to in the first place,” Alsup said.
He added that he does not think that X wants to protect users’ privacy, since “X Corp. is happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ content so long as it gets paid.”
The judge closed the case Thursday, but allowed X to file a motion for leave to amend its complaint.
Another federal judge also tossed X’s claims against the Center for Countering Digital Hate in March, saying that the center’s activity is valid under the First Amendment. X also accused that nonprofit of violating its terms of service when it used a data-scraping tool to cull tweets with harmful content and then published reports about them, which influenced advertisers not to do business on X and cost the social media giant millions in ad revenue.
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