Originally published at: Musk sues data scrapers in a futile bid to save Twitter | Boing Boing
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That’s how you know Elon is not serious about running a social media business. Other owners would simply spin this to their shareholders as a bump in engagement numbers.
He’s like your local cable, water or transit monopoly complaining about spikes in usage. It’s funny, he does keep saying he wants to be the free-speech town square, and the longer he starves Twitter of funds, technical and non-technical outreach and service teams, the more it does feel like a public/private monopoly utility instead of a private service.
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The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far
Was one of them 127.0.0.1?
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You are likely right, but I was going to (hopefully) guess it also might have been ::1 (IPv6 loopback address) but that would assume that newer code is used on their platform.
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“For 45 billion dollars!”
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Why is scraping illegal? I’ve run sites that were targets of serious scraping, and used usual techniques to minimise it. However, always thought the act of scraping so long as not effectively denial of service was OK, publishing the scrapped data would of course be much more problematic.
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It’s not. LinkedIn already lost this.
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“Twitter’s talent” is a funny way to describe all the people that Twitter fired. I mean it’s obvious they fired pretty much all their talent, but then it isn’t really still theirs, is it. If he valued their work he should have kept them.
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The complaint is 6 (six!) pages long and has 1 (one!) claim for unjust enrichment, with a few paragraphs making extremely generalized claims about how data scaping theoretically degrades service. But there is not one single allegation of any private information being breached or any description of what the actual damages to Twitter are. They make a mention of data scraping being against TOS, but don’t make any claim for a breach of contract.
This complaint reads like it was drafted in half an hour by an associate who performed zero research into the facts or the law that may apply.
ETA: I never get it why any story anywhere discusses a judicial opinion or a complaint without directly linking to the PDF of the filing. WHY?
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Ironically, if it actually was a third-party scraper and not a self-pwn api fuckup by Elmo himself, it is trivially easy to shut down a scraper.
…unless you fired all the “dead wood” that could’ve done it for you, in which case, 
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As if Elno isn’t going to self-scrape for his AI startup.
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Elon Musk’s X Corporation filed lawsuits against four John Does who allegedly “engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter” by “flooding Twitter’s sign-up page with automated requests,”
I just got to know if one of those John Does happens to be Google, and will he later sue Google for delisting their catalog of tweets as a result of his self help to curb scrapers.
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“There is ONE Twitter,”
Just the other week she was talking about Twitter 2.0. 
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So… while in the middle of a slew of viable lawsuits against him, and after firing most of his legal department, Lone Skum decided it was a good idea to file two suits that are NOT viable?
Wow…
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