Elon Musk's X Corp loses lawsuit against Israeli data-scraping company

Legal low for X: A lawsuit in which billionaire Elon Musk's X Corp levelled allegations on 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, has been dismissed by a US court. 
The court on Thursday said 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. The legal counsels for X did not immediately respond on Friday to requests for comment. Bright Data's lawyers too did not immediately respond to similar requests. Alsup said X can try to amend its complaint, which sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breach of contract, trespass and misappropriation. The San Francisco-based company sued Bright Data last July.

In March, another San Francisco federal judge dismissed X's lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which published articles based on scraped data that faulted a rise in hate speech on the platform. X claimed that the articles were scaring away advertisers, costing it millions of dollars, and has appealed the decision.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. His other businesses include electric car company Tesla.

(With Reuters inputs )