Elon Musk's X can't invent its own copyright law, judge says

[usonian]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/elon-musks-x-tried-and-failed-to-make-its-own-copyright-system-judge-says/

Judge rules copyright law governs public data scraping, not X’s terms.


meme, not a quote

A US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.

X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

"To the extent the claims are based on access to systems, they fail because X Corp. has alleged no more than threadbare recitals," parroting laws and findings in other cases without providing any supporting evidence, Alsup wrote. "To the extent the claims are based on scraping and selling of data, they fail because they are preempted by federal law," specifically standing as an "obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of" the Copyright Act.

Here's the order:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/X-Corp-v-Bright-Data-Order-Dismissing-Complaint-5-9-24.pdf

A comment on Hacker News hits the nail on the head.

The topic here reminds me so strongly of Web Scraping for Me but not for Thee, which talks about how viciously companies are trying to fight scraping on the public internet. The use of contract law - writing whatever terms of use you want - to erode away at humanity's rights has been a long running war, and it's great to see some push back against companies being able to strip rights away from the public as they please (of course add in any DRM at all and suddenly that same exercise of rights is now a felony sooo don't get too happy yet). This could totally be a momentous red letter day!

[Celerity]

1. K&R for visibility