May 10 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit in

which Elon Musk's X Corp accused an Israeli data-scraping

company of illegally copying and selling content, and selling

tools that let others copy and sell content, from the social

media platform.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled on

Thursday that X, formerly Twitter, failed to plausibly allege

that Bright Data Ltd violated its user agreement by allowing the

scraping and evading X's own anti-scraping technology.

Alsup said using scraping tools is not inherently

fraudulent, and giving social media companies free rein to

decide how public data are used "risks the possible creation of

information monopolies that would disserve the public interest."

The judge also said X was not entitled to "de facto

copyright ownership" in copyrighted content that X's users made

available to the public.

Lawyers for X did not immediately respond on Friday to

requests for comment. Bright Data's lawyers did not immediately

respond to similar requests.

Alsup said X can try to amend its complaint, which sought

unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for breach of

contract, trespass and misappropriation. The San Francisco-based

company sued Bright Data last July.

In March, another San Francisco federal judge dismissed X's

lawsuit against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital

Hate, which published articles based on scraped data that

faulted a rise in hate speech on the platform.

X claimed that the articles were scaring away advertisers,

costing it millions of dollars, and has appealed the decision.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. His

other businesses include electric car company Tesla.

The case is X Corp v Bright Data Ltd, U.S. District Court,

Northern District of California, No. 23-03698.