Report from Reuters
In Brief – Google has filed a federal lawsuit accusing SerpApi of illegally and massively circumventing its technical safeguards intended to block automated scraping of search results with the intent of accessing and reselling copyrighted and licensed content that appears in various Google services. The search giant says it spends significant resources combating scraping abuse by companies like SerpApi, which Google alleges uses hundreds of millions of automated, fake search requests to gather Google search results. SerpApi denied wrongdoing and said it merely provides its clients information that is publicly visible on the internet to any user with a web browser and that Google’s lawsuit is an attempt to suppress competition from companies building alternative AI, security, and productivity tools.
Context – In October, Reddit filed a similar lawsuit alleging that Perplexity AI, a startup challenging Google with a search engine using generative AI, and its tech providers like SerpApi, were engaged in “industrial-scale” evasion of Google’s access controls to scrape Reddit content off billions of Google search engine results pages, which Perplexity then reproduced as its own. Reddit argues that Perplexity and SerpApi undermine its paid data licensing deals with companies like OpenAI and Google. Both the Reddit and Google lawsuits allege violations of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which are notorious among open internet backers. Although these two lawsuits involve AI and copyright, they are largely distinct from the many lawsuits brought by authors and publishers that will determine if basic AI training violated US copyright law and will largely hinge on the issue of fair use. While scraped data is often used in AI training, Perplexity is scraping Google search results to make its own search service timelier, something that matters as AI chatbots and search functionally merge. Expect more suits as AI developers like Google, OpenAI, and Meta pay online publishers for preferential access to content to improve their chatbot results while others try to access the same content without paying.