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Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive
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- DeepHorus
Reddit’s unusual legal campaign to police AI-powered search scraping survived a key hurdle on Friday, as a federal judge largely refused to dismiss its copyright claims against web-scraping firm SerpApi. The case, which also involves AI search startup Perplexity AI, centers on allegations that the two companies colluded to bypass technical barriers protecting Reddit content from unauthorized scraping. US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled that Reddit had plausibly alleged a conspiracy, marking a notable contrast to a separate lawsuit filed by Google over similar conduct just two weeks earlier. In that case, a judge dismissed Google’s claims, saying the company failed to prove that rights holders, including Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to block scraping of protected content. Google has said it will amend its complaint, while SerpApi has framed the litigation as an attempt by Reddit and Google to weaponize the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to close off the open internet by controlling content they neither authored nor own. The judge’s decision means Reddit can proceed with its central allegations that SerpApi provided Perplexity AI with a product designed to circumvent Google’s access-control technology, and that Perplexity paid for it. To win the case, Reddit must eventually prove three elements: that the agents accessed copyrighted works, that those works were protected by effective technological measures, and that the defendants actually circumvented those measures. While Google failed on the first prong in its own lawsuit, Engelmayer’s ruling in Reddit’s favor suggests that the broader legal landscape may favor platforms that deploy anti-bot systems. The timing is significant, as Google’s technology was created more than a year after the company struck a licensing deal with Reddit, a point that could complicate claims of joint authorization. Legal experts say the split decisions create uncertainty for companies that aggregate web content for AI training and search products. Web scrapers and AI firms are now closely watching how courts interpret the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions in the context of AI, as the rulings could set precedent for who controls online data. Both cases are likely to continue, with Google promising to amend its complaint and Reddit pressing forward, potentially reshaping how search engines and AI companies access user-generated content on major platforms.
