Report from MediaPost
In Brief – Federal District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has dismissed Google’s complaint against the Texas-based company SerpApi for allegedly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions by evading technological measures designed to block automated scraping of search results. Google sued SerpApi last year, alleging that it receives hundreds of millions of artificial search requests from SerpApi each day and claimed the service bypassed its “SearchGuard” system, introduced in January 2025, including by using automated methods to defeat CAPTCHAs. SerpApi argued that Google lacked standing because it does not own copyrights for most of the material displayed on its search results pages, instead organizing publicly available information. Judge Gonzalez Rogers largely agreed, ruling that Google cannot pursue DMCA anti-circumvention claims for content in which it has no copyright interest. She is permitting Google to amend its complaint regarding its licensed content, but not other search-result material.
Context – Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi in January followed a parallel lawsuit by Reddit against Perplexity AI and SerpAPI last October. Perplexity AI is a startup challenging Google with a search engine that it says is based on generative AI. Reddit alleges that Perplexity and its tech providers including SerpAPI have been engaged in “industrial-scale” evasion of Google’s access controls in violation of the DMCA to scrape Reddit content off billions of Google search engine results pages, which Perplexity then reproduced as its own search results. Reddit argues that Perplexity and SerpApi undermine its paid data licensing deals with AI 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. Recent reports indicate that Reddit is weighing restricting Google’s AI access to its content due to declining traffic through Google search rather than extending its current $60 million licensing deal.