Reddit Pursues DMCA Lawsuit Over Google Search Scrape
A judge largely denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Reddit against web scraper SerpApi, accusing it of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted content from Google search results.
A federal judge has allowed Reddit's lawsuit to proceed against companies accused of illegally scraping copyrighted content from Google search results. The suit names web scraper SerpApi and Perplexity AI as defendants.
US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer stated that Reddit has plausibly pleaded a conspiracy. The social media platform alleges that SerpApi provides a product to circumvent Google's access controls, and Perplexity AI pays for this product to unlawfully gather content.
The decision comes less than two weeks after a separate court dismissed a similar case brought by Google. In that instance, Google failed to prove that rights holders had authorized it to prevent the scraping of protected content. Google has indicated it plans to amend its complaint.
SerpApi has argued that Google and Reddit are attempting to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to "wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own."