Report from ArsTechnica
In Brief – US District Judge Paul Engelmayer has largely denied a motion to dismiss from SerpApi, a company accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. Engelmayer ruled that Reddit had plausibly alleged SerpApi supplied technology to bypass Google’s access controls while Perplexity AI paid for the service, allowing the case to proceed. Reddit argued its licensing agreement with Google restricts certain uses of its content and requires the removal of deleted posts, obligations that are undermined when AI scrapers circumvent Google’s protections. The judge dismissed Reddit’s unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims as preempted by copyright law. A lawyer for SerpApi responded to the decision saying, “The court has decided to hear the facts; the facts are on our side. SerpApi accesses public search results, not Reddit’s platform, and public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it.”
Context – Google and Reddit have each sued SerpApi and its customer Perplexity AI, a search startup that says it is based on generative AI. Reddit surviving SerpApi’s motion to dismiss contrasts with the recent ruling by District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to largely dismiss Google’s lawsuit. Reddit and Google both allege that Perplexity and SerpAPI have been engaged in “industrial-scale” evasion of Google’s access controls in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (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’s actions 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 DMCA, which are notorious among open internet backers. Recent reports indicate that Reddit is weighing ending its $60 million licensing deal with Google and restricting Google’s AI access to its content due to declining traffic through Google search.