Lithuanian proxy solutions provider Oxylabs filed a lawsuit against its Israeli competitor Bright Data alleging patent infringement. The new lawsuit is the latest episode in a series of legal disputes between the two companies.
In the filing submitted to the United States Texas Eastern District Court, Oxylabs claims that Bright Data has been infringing upon three of their patents concerning Smart Proxy Rotator and web script management technologies for the provisioning of web scraping and other business services.
"Oxylabs is committed to principles of ethics and fairness in the proxy marketplace. That includes respecting valid intellectual property rights. With this lawsuit, we have made it known to Bright Data that it must respect Oxylabs' existing and growing patent portfolio. We believe that Bright Data's unfair business practices stifle innovation and competition, leading to potential market monopolization", - Julius Cerniauskas, CEO of Oxylabs commented in the company's official statement.
The proxy industry is becoming mainstream
Technology companies Oxylabs and Bright Data are competing for the market leader's position in the growing industry of web scraping and proxy solutions. They provide tools and infrastructure for collecting publicly available web data at large scale.
In recent years, such solutions have become critical to industries like ecommerce, that use it for price intelligence, market research and review monitoring; search intelligence optimization, that depend on it for keyword research; and cybersecurity, that employ the technology for email protection and web monitoring.
Oxylabs and Bright Data share the largest portion of the industry, with smaller market players seeking to gain their own share. NetNut, SmartProxy, GeoSurf, Zyte, SOAX are a few names to mention.
The technologies enabling large-scale data gathering have been evolving rapidly and causing fierce competition among their providers similarly as in other innovation-heavy industries. Patent infringement cases have been marking the development of the proxy industry for several years now.
Bright Data and Oxylabs have been in multiple legal disputes regarding the infringement of different patents ever since 2018. The two companies have recently been ordered to resolve the disagreements through a mediation procedure, which was supposed to happen early this year.
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