Dear friends in the web scraping community,
One month after a court shut down Meta’s attempt to block Bright Data from scraping public web data from its sites, Meta filed a notice to dismiss its claim against Bright Data. The notice of dismissal ends the tortious interference claim, which focuses largely on customers’ use of Bright Data’s services. It also waives Meta’s ability to appeal the court’s summary judgment opinion, which supports Bright Data’s fundamental principle that public data must remain free and accessible. This legal victory only strengthens our fundamental belief in the necessity and legitimacy of web scraping in an era where data is pivotal.
Meta, a former web scraping customer of ours, approached us with the demand to stop our customers from scraping public data from its platforms. We knew the right thing to do was to ensure all public data stayed public, even if it meant going to court against a company 2,000 times our size. Despite many efforts by tech giants to exclusively control public information on the internet, common sense prevailed.
Free access to public web data creates a fair and transparent market for businesses to compete. Organizations and researchers can continue their missions to protect individuals online and learn more about our world through these platforms. AI companies can access the public web data needed to build useful tools that can advance our quality of life. But, these things only happen with free access to the public web data on all platforms.
The court’s earlier decision and the dismissal of the suit validate our company’s vision and belief that information should be freely available for innovation and transparency. It affirms our path and solidifies our role as the leader in public web data collection with 20,000 customers from every sector around the world, 5,500 granted patent claims, and the inventor of modern scraping technology including the Scraping Browser. Founded a decade ago, we innovated first and hold the world’s best technology that allows users to access public web data.
As the leader, it falls to us to uphold the highest ethical standards and compliance measures, ensuring all practices that lead to the collection of public data are transparent and beneficial. Our entire team, which includes a dedicated ethics department, has set the standard for our industry and will continue to raise the bar as we develop new technologies to make accessing data feasible for the world. Ethics is something we embody as a company. We have laid out, in intricate detail, how we operate at all levels, and that information is available to anyone.
The safety and security of the internet is a serious issue, which is why we work with 6 of the 10 leading security companies in the world and partner with many organizations whose mission is to protect the web.
We have taken many steps to ensure we remain the leader in technology, responsibility, and the future of the web for years to come. For companies without these clear practices, this ruling is a clarion call for maintaining transparency and ethical standards in data collection.
Thank you for your continued support and trust in Bright Data.
Or Lenchner
CEO Bright Data
