Judge Keeps Reddit’s DMCA Scraping Suit Alive, Denying Most of SerpApi’s Dismissal Bid
Updated
Updated · Ars Technica · Jul 31
Judge Keeps Reddit’s DMCA Scraping Suit Alive, Denying Most of SerpApi’s Dismissal Bid
3 articles · Updated · Ars Technica · Jul 31
Summary
US District Judge Paul Engelmayer largely denied SerpApi’s motion to dismiss, ruling Reddit plausibly alleged a conspiracy with Perplexity AI to scrape copyrighted Reddit snippets from Google search results.
The opinion said Reddit sufficiently pleaded that SerpApi sold a tool to bypass Google access controls and that Perplexity paid for it, allowing the DMCA anti-circumvention case to proceed at an early stage.
That marks a contrast with a similar Google suit dismissed less than two weeks ago, where a court found Google had not shown rights holders such as Reddit authorized it to block scraping of protected content.
SerpApi said Reddit and Google were trying to use the DMCA to control content they “didn’t author and don’t own,” while Google has said it plans to amend its complaint to revive its own case.
The ruling suggests Reddit may be able to prove Google’s anti-scraping technology effectively controlled access to copyrighted material—a threshold issue that could shape related fights over AI scraping and search-result data.