Reddit’s DMCA Scraping Case Against SerpApi Survives Dismissal

A federal judge on Friday denied a motion to dismiss filed by web scraping tool SerpApi, keeping Reddit's DMCA lawsuit alive. US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled that Reddit has plausibly alleged a conspiracy between SerpApi and Perplexity AI: SerpApi allegedly supplied a product to get around Google's access controls, and Perplexity AI allegedly paid for it. The decision came less than two weeks after a separate court threw out a related case brought by Google itself, finding Google had not proven that content owners like Reddit ever authorized it to block scraping on their behalf.

What happened

Detail	Fact
Ruling	Motion to dismiss denied (largely)
Judge	US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer
Defendants	SerpApi (web scraper), Perplexity AI
Allegation	Conspiracy to scrape Reddit content from Google search results via DMCA circumvention
Related Google case	Dismissed less than two weeks prior

Reddit sued SerpApi and Perplexity AI, claiming the two conspired to illegally scrape Reddit’s copyrighted content from Google search results. The theory is that SerpApi’s product bypasses Google’s access controls, and Perplexity AI paid for that access to pull content it had no right to use.

Judge Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has made a plausible case. That is a relatively low bar in federal court: it does not mean Reddit has proved anything yet, only that the claims are credible enough to proceed to discovery.

Why the Google case matters here

The timing is notable. Less than two weeks before Engelmayer’s ruling, a different court dismissed a similar DMCA action that Google had filed over the same scraping activity. That court found Google had not established that rights holders like Reddit ever actually gave the search engine authority to block scraping of their content on their behalf.

In other words, Google tried to assert a protection it may not have been granted. Reddit, as an actual rights holder, is in a stronger legal position to make that claim directly. That distinction is likely why Reddit’s case survived while Google’s stumbled.

Google told Ars Technica it plans to amend its complaint to keep its own lawsuit moving forward.

What SerpApi says

SerpApi pushed back on the framing from both Reddit and Google. The company told Ars Technica that both plaintiffs are trying to “use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.” That argument will likely resurface as a central defense as the case develops.

The DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (the parts of copyright law that prohibit bypassing technical protections on digital content) were originally written to stop piracy of things like DVDs and software. Applying them to search index scraping is a newer and contested legal theory, and courts have not settled it yet.

Why it matters for AI companies and publishers

This case sits at the intersection of two fights that are reshaping how AI products get built: who can scrape what, and who controls access to indexed web content. Perplexity AI is an AI-powered answer engine that competes directly with Google Search. If Reddit and Google can use DMCA claims to block tools that pull from search results, the implications for any AI product that relies on web data are significant.

Publishers watching the pressure that AI-driven search is already putting on traffic have a direct stake in how this plays out. A ruling in Reddit’s favor could give content owners a new legal lever against AI scrapers, beyond the robots.txt and terms-of-service arguments that have mostly failed so far.

Our take

The legal theory here is genuinely novel and the outcome is far from certain. Reddit is in a better position than Google to bring this claim, because Reddit actually holds the relevant copyrights. But the DMCA anti-circumvention argument applied to search result scraping is untested enough that this case could go several ways on appeal.

What is clear is that AI companies building products on scraped web data are facing more litigation, not less. If you run a site with original content and want to understand how AI scraping affects your organic visibility, our SEO services include content strategy and technical audits that account for how AI crawlers interact with your site.

For businesses using or building AI tools that depend on third-party data, this is a case worth tracking. The outcome will set a precedent for what “access controls” mean in the context of search indexes, and that affects a wide range of AI integration decisions going forward.

Source: Ars Technica · AI