• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 29, 2024

A federal judge who threw out X Corp's lawsuit against Israeli analytics company Bright Data said this week that he will allow X to amend some of its claims and bring them again.

The ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California, comes in a lawsuit brought in July 2023 by X Corp., which accused Bright Data of using automated tools to collect data about tweets, and also selling both the scraped data and data-scraping tools. The complaint included claims that Bright Data violated X Corp.'s terms of service, and that it misappropriated X Corp's data.

Alsup said in an opinion issued in May that he was dismissing claims relating to scraping data because X Corp.'s allegations, even if proven true, wouldn't show how the company was harmed by the alleged scraping. He also ruled that federal copyright law overrode X Corp's claims relating to Bright Data's alleged sale of data that had been publicly posted by users.

X Corp. then proposed amending its complaint by claiming that the alleged scraping harmed the company in several ways -- including by causing a “glitchy” experience for users.

Alsup essentially said in a 21-page ruling issued Tuesday that those new allegations warranted further proceedings.

“X Corp. newly alleges that scrapers traverse the X service in patterns markedly different from humans or authorized machines, that scrapers thus use underlying server capacity in abnormal proportions, and that this results in intermittent, isolated server failures and a 'glitchy, lagged user experience' for X’s human users,” Alsup wrote.

He added that X Corp. also alleged that if it hadn't purchased “millions of dollars of server capacity,” the alleged scraping would have resulted in “catastrophic system failures.”

With those allegations, “X Corp.’s proposed complaint now sufficiently alleges server impairment from scrapers accessing its service,” Alsup wrote.

At the same time Alsup refused to allow X Corp. to revive claims that Bright Data misappropriated users' tweets. Instead, he reiterated his prior holding that claims regarding the misappropriation and sale of data were overridden by federal copyright law.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen in the Northern District of California sided with Bright Data in a lawsuit over scraping brought by Meta Platforms. Chen ruled in that matter that Bright Data didn't violate Meta's terms of service by scraping publicly available data from Instagram and Facebook because Bright Data wasn't logged in when it gathered the data.