Comment by metalcrow
2 days ago
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
2 days ago
Anyone familiar with the legal reasons Twitter might be able to prevent sites like nitter from working? I believe scraping is legal but I'm sure there are details that make this different
From the letter(s):
> X has documentary evidence that you are scraping X Data, circumventing X’s API access controls and rate limits, accessing X using X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules, and republishing X Data to the public. X’s Terms of Service, Developer Agreement, and Developer Policy strictly forbid such conduct. See https://x.com/en/tos (“[C]rawling or scraping the Services in any form . . . is expressly prohibited.”). By your own description, Nitter “uses Twitter’s unofficial API” and routes all requests through your servers, and requires operators to supply real X accounts to function.
> Your actions constitute a flagrant breach of the contractual and legal obligations you agreed to when accessing the X services. Your actions also violate various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).
Ironic that the company calling itself “the public town square” is complaining about someone making their content public.
I wonder how xAI steals its AI training material! Of course no scraping is involved!1!!
They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?
Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL
Is this comparable to LinkedIn scraping?
That's a lot of unknowns, I doubt this text can actually hold in a court of law
A similar case Musk filed against an Israeli data scraping firm already got laughed out of court.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/musks-x-corp-loses-lawsuit-aga...
But I guess the nitter owner doesn't want to take any chances until he actually gets a court ruling in his favor.
if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently