May 10 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Elon Musk’s X Corp accused an Israeli data-scraping company of illegally copying and selling content, and selling tools that let others copy and sell content, from the social media platform.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled on Thursday that X, formerly Twitter, failed to plausibly allege that Bright Data Ltd violated its user agreement by allowing the scraping and evading X’s own anti-scraping technology.
Alsup said using scraping tools is not inherently fraudulent, and giving social media companies free rein to decide how public data are used “risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest.” The judge also said X was not entitled to “de facto copyright ownership” in copyrighted content that X’s users made available to the public.
Based.
Alsup is one of the few judges who actually bothers to have a clue about what they’re doing.
AVA/NHI: asshole vs asshole, no humans involved.
No matter who wins here, everyone loses
If shitter had won this it would have enabled a raft of lawsuits and redefined section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Both companies are of course garbage
allowing the scraping and evading X’s own anti-scraping technology.
I wonder why evading anti-scraping technology is not treated like bypassing DRM or the DMCAs anti-circumvention rules.
DRM manages rights for products you own. Twitter does not own your posts. Simple.
Let’s see what happens if China does it.