As the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to rise, complex questions regarding the regulation of AI data scraping remain relevant to both website owners and web data collection companies. Though many websites have attempted to prohibit AI data scraping of their content through their terms of use, a federal court clarified this year that the extent to which public data may be scraped from social media platforms should be governed by federal copyright law.
Data scraping is the process by which data is extracted and copied from websites, including social media platforms, usually for the purpose of training AI large language models. Because scraped data can include user-generated content and personal information, many companies explicitly prohibit data scraping through their terms of use. One such company is X Corp., owner and operator of the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), which recently attempted to enforce…
