Court Rules X Copyright Case Will Continue With Some Counterclaims
The U.S. District Court for Northern California ruled on Friday that social media platform X's copyright case against a data-scraping company will continue, and it allowed some but not all of data scraper Bright Data's counterclaims to continue as well. "The scraper states plausible claims for relief," the court said.
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In the 2023 case, X Corp v. Bright Data (23-03698), the social media platform alleges Bright Data extracted and copied public data from it and sells tools that help others do the same. X asserted breach-of-contract and sought to bar Bright Data from scraping data (see 2501130064).
Bright Data then asserted various counterclaims, such as alleging the social media platform’s attempts to remove rights of the public to access and scrape public portions of the web are anticompetitive conduct (see 2502040067), which X then moved to dismiss while keeping the original complaint (see 2502110067).
The district court ruled that the data scraper's claims of violations of antitrust laws and of unlawful and unfair competition could stand because "X Corp. is doing more than merely refusing to deal with scrapers" the court said. "X Corp. is forcing its own customers not to deal with scrapers, in perpetuity, a much different problem under the Sherman Act ... For similar reasons, Bright Data’s counterclaims also state a plausible claim for relief from monopolization and monopoly attempts."