District Court: X Must Turn Over Evidence in Data-Scraping Copyright Case
The U.S. District Court for Northern California on Thursday ordered that social media platform X submit server logs and other evidence in its copyright case against a data-scraping company by Monday, April 14 at noon PT. The evidence was supposed to be presented to data scraper Bright Data -- the defendant -- but X has yet to do so, the court said.
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Since the "case concerns a social media platform’s complaint that a data scraper impaired its servers," X "disclosed it would show server logs and other such evidence at trial" about six months ago, said Judge William Alsup. "But it still has not turned over that evidence to defendant, or so says the scraper in a letter brief that requests an order to compel and an extra deposition."
Bright Data said that this is a delay of information that the entire case hinges on, in a letter to the court Wednesday that asks the judge to intervene. "Despite repeated efforts over six months to obtain this information from X, X has not identified any server failures that may be at issue or even what information systems X maintains that could bear on this issue," said the data scraper.
The court ordered that any response to the Thursday letter must be filed by Monday at noon PT, and the parties will meet in-person to discuss the issue on Thursday, April 17 at 8 a.m. PT.
In case 23-03698, X Corp v. Bright Data, the social media platform alleges Bright Data extracted and copied public data from it and sells tools that helps others do the same (see 2501130064). X pressed the court to dismiss the case twice (see 2502110067), which Bright Data opposed on Feb. 4 (see 2502040067).