Musk’s X Corp sues Israel’s Bright Data for scraping data
timesofisrael.com
timesofisrael.com
Ordinarily I would say scraping is legal, but only because there's no agreement between the scraping party and the service being scraped that states the contrary. In this case, the scraper agreed not to do so with Twitter, then breached that agreement.
So this wasn't a joke? Musk is really rebranding everything as 'x'?
The company is now X, the logo is X, the <title> tag says X, and the app is now X.
Only the .com remains, for now. I suspect it’s the hardest to change.
I was going to joke about Prince and Weird Al fighting over the name but I see I said that already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604783
Increasingly, no.
As for the other claims, it seems to boil down to "scraping is against our ToS, and therefore they breached their contract." I'm not savvy enough on the case law to know how strong of a claim this is, but on a first inspection, I've noticed something curious. Twitter talks about a couple of ways that scraping would breach their ToS and then when talking about Bright Data, they don't quite allege that Bright Data did any of those, just that it engaged in scraping.
(It also feels to me like someone started drafting up a claim on violating the CFAA, until another lawyer tapped them on the shoulder and informed them that 9th Circuit precedent from last year is that scraping is absolutely not a CFAA violation.)
Yes, they have (paragraph 77). I suppose you could argue that it is not pled with sufficient specificity, but it looks like they’ve probably pled sufficient details to support it without actually being very explicit in drawing the connection (e.g., providing a mechanism for evading rate limits denies Twitter revenue that otherwise would be received by people seeking the data paying through tiered API access that Twitter sells, referenced in paragraph 27.) This seems like the kind of thing that, if it is a problem, will likely just be addressed by an amended complaint.
> As for the other claims, it seems to boil down to “scraping is against our ToS, and therefore they breached their contract.” I’m not savvy enough on the case law to know how strong of a claim this is, but on a first inspection, I’ve noticed something curious. Twitter talks about a couple of ways that scraping would breach their ToS and then when talking about Bright Data, they don’t quite allege that Bright Data did any of those, just that it engaged in scraping.
They identify in general terms the nature of the breach in the breach cause of action (paragraph 64 lists five specific categories of actions in violation of the ToS), each of which is supported more specifically in the general narrative in paragraphs 1-57 that are realleged in each cause of action.
https://twitter.com/robots.txt
Therefore, this disallows other bots in "maschinenlesbarer Form" and the scraping is illegal.
And most of these rules don't respect anyone else's. Your people in your country do whatever you say whenever they travel across the internet afar. But those people running their servers also have their own laws that apply to them. The potential for conflict here is vast.
How do website terms of service work in Switzerland, especially in the case where the person using the website has actually gone through the account creation process there?