Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive

On Friday, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer largely denied a motion to dismiss from SerpApi, a web scraper accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. Engelmayer ruled that Reddit had plausibly pleaded a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it. The decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action brought by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders like Reddit had authorized the search engine to prevent scraping of protected content. Google told Ars Technica it planned to amend its complaint, while SerpApi argued that Google and Reddit are both trying to use the DMCA to wall off the open internet. The key issues are whether the parties conspired, whether the content was protected by technological measures, and whether the defendants circumvented that technology. Google failed on the first prong, but Engelmayer agreed with Reddit that it was plausible the company had authorized Google to use anti-circumvention technology, even though Google's technology was invented more than a year after the licensing deal between Google and Reddit.