We live in an age in which data is gold. To protect its gold aka data, Reddit filed a lawsuit in California state court against Anthropic for allegedly scraping Reddit posts without authorization.
Reddit alleges five state law claims:
- Breach of contract
- Unjust enchrichment, plead in the alternative
- Trespass to chattels
- Tortious interference with contract
- Unfair Competition Under Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17200
Notably, the complaint does not allege a copyright infringement claim. This lawsuit adds to the growing list of lawsuits over data scraping outside of copyright law. These include:
- Meta v. Bright Data: district court granted summary judgment and held that “the Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data.”
- LinkedIn v. hiQ Labs: 9th Circuit affirmed denial of preliminary injunction and doubted CFAA claim was meritorious.
- Cousart v. OpenAI: district court dismissed case due to deficiencies in allegations of claims.
Excerpts of Complaint
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLAINT
One response to “Reddit v. Anthropic Complaint (PDF): state law claims for scraping Reddit posts”
Reddit is basing its breach of contract claim on a “browsewrap”