Reddit's DMCA Lawsuit Against AI Scraper SerpApi Survives Dismissal Attempt

A federal judge has allowed Reddit's unusual DMCA lawsuit against web scraper SerpApi and AI answer engine Perplexity AI to move forward, ruling that Reddit plausibly alleged a conspiracy to illegally scrape copyrighted content from Google search results. US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer denied SerpApi's motion to dismiss, finding that Reddit had adequately argued that SerpApi provided a circumvention tool and that Perplexity AI paid to use it — a two-party arrangement Reddit frames as a deliberate scheme to bypass access controls.

The ruling comes less than two weeks after a separate court dismissed a similar DMCA claim brought by Google against SerpApi, finding Google had not proven that rights holders like Reddit ever authorized the search engine to block scraping on their behalf. Engelmayer distinguished Reddit's case from Google's, noting that Reddit went further than Google's broad boilerplate claim — specifically arguing that its licensing agreement with Google includes concrete obligations, such as deleting flagged posts when Reddit users remove their content. Reddit says millions of posts are deleted monthly, and that SerpApi's scraping of Google's search cache makes those removals meaningless, damaging both Reddit's user trust and its business.

The judge also addressed a timeline wrinkle that could have sunk the case: Google's anti-scraping technology, SearchGuard, was developed more than a year after Reddit and Google signed their licensing deal. Engelmayer ruled it would be impractical to require partners to renegotiate contracts every time new security tools are deployed, keeping that prong of Reddit's argument intact. Still, the judge acknowledged SerpApi could mount a strong defense during discovery — particularly if it can prove Reddit never explicitly authorized Google to enforce protections on its behalf, or that publicly available Google search snippets aren't covered by copyright law at all.

If Reddit ultimately prevails, it could establish a legal template forcing AI companies to license content rather than scrape it freely, a significant outcome for the broader AI data-rights battle. Reddit has requested three separate injunctions: blocking SerpApi and Perplexity AI from accessing Reddit and Google sites, stopping circumvention of Google SearchGuard, and prohibiting use of data already scraped. SerpApi's attorney pushed back firmly, arguing that his client accesses public search results — not Reddit's platform directly — and that public information doesn't become proprietary simply because a platform wants to monetize it. A DMCA policy expert characterized the legal strategy from both Google and Reddit as improvised, noting that Reddit's standing to sue under the DMCA is genuinely murky since it is neither the copyright owner, an exclusive licensee, nor the deployer of the technological protection measure in question.