Reddit's DMCA Lawsuit Against Perplexity AI and SerpApi Survives Dismissal

A federal judge has largely kept Reddit's unusual copyright lawsuit alive against web scraper SerpApi and AI answer engine Perplexity AI, ruling that Reddit plausibly alleged a conspiracy to illegally scrape copyrighted content from Google search results. US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer denied most of SerpApi's motion to dismiss, finding Reddit had done enough at this early stage to argue that SerpApi provided tools to circumvent Google's access controls and that Perplexity AI paid to use them.

The ruling arrives less than two weeks after a different court dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by Google against SerpApi — a rare early-stage win for the scraper. In that case, the judge found Google failed to prove rights holders like Reddit had ever authorized the search giant to block scraping on their behalf. Engelmayer, however, found Reddit's argument stronger: unlike Google's broad, vague claims, Reddit pointed to a specific licensing agreement requiring partners to delete flagged posts when users remove content. Reddit says millions of posts are deleted monthly, and that SerpApi's tools — deployed by Perplexity AI — make honoring those deletions impossible, damaging both its reputation and revenue.

A notable wrinkle: Google's anti-circumvention technology at the center of the dispute was developed more than a year after Reddit and Google signed their licensing deal. Engelmayer brushed aside the timing issue, reasoning it would be impractical to expect partners to renegotiate contracts every time new security methods are deployed. SerpApi's central counterargument — that it only accesses publicly available Google search results, not Reddit's platform directly, and that public information can't become protected just because a platform wants to monetize it — remains live and will be tested through discovery.

The stakes are significant for the broader AI scraping debate. If Reddit ultimately prevails, it could gain leverage to force AI companies into licensing agreements, building on the paid data deals it has already struck. Reddit has asked the court for three separate injunctions: blocking SerpApi and Perplexity AI from accessing Reddit and Google, halting circumvention of Google's SearchGuard system, and preventing use of already-scraped data. The court did hand SerpApi a partial win, tossing Reddit's unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims as preempted by federal copyright law.

Legal observers note the whole fight sits on shaky conceptual ground. A DMCA expert at Public Knowledge pointed out that Reddit is in a strange position — it's not the copyright owner of user posts, not an exclusive licensee, and not the entity that built or deployed the technological protection measure in question. That same expert suggested DMCA outcomes in novel cases like this tend to be driven more by judicial instinct than settled doctrine, making the ultimate winner genuinely hard to predict.