Elon Musk, the owner of X Corp., has filed a lawsuit against four unidentified individuals for allegedly scraping user data from Twitter. The lawsuit, which was filed in a Texas court on July 6th, seeks damages exceeding $1 million.
According to the complaint, the four entities, only identified by their IP addresses, violated Twitter’s terms of service by unlawfully scraping user data. This was done by flooding Twitter’s sign-up page with automated requests, resulting in server strain and disruption to users’ experience.
X Corp. claims that it has been unable to determine the identities of all four individuals. The company argues that the defendants’ actions resulted in unjust enrichment at the expense of X Corp., alleging that they profited from their unauthorized scraping activities.
To address the issue of aggressive data-scraping, X Corp. has implemented limits on the number of tweets each user can view in a day. Additionally, access to tweets has been restricted for users who are not signed in to a registered Twitter account.
However, this lawsuit may face legal challenges due to a ruling by the US Ninth Circuit of Appeals last year. The ruling stated that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is commonly used in anti-scraping lawsuits. On the other hand, the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ruled in 2020 that data scraping can be considered unjust enrichment, which aligns with X Corp.’s argument in this case.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, he has implemented several changes to prevent AI companies from scraping Twitter’s data for training large language models. Recently, Twitter temporarily limited the number of posts users can read and even considered suing Microsoft for alleged illegal training using Twitter data.
In conclusion, Elon Musk’s X Corp. is taking legal action against four individuals who allegedly scraped user data from Twitter. The lawsuit seeks substantial damages, but it may face challenges given the conflicting rulings regarding data scraping. Musk’s efforts to protect Twitter’s data from being misused by AI companies have led to various changes on the platform, including temporary limits on post access.
