The Reddit SerpApi DMCA lawsuit will move ahead for now after US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer largely rejected SerpApi’s attempt to get the case dismissed. Reddit alleges that SerpApi worked with Perplexity AI to pull copyrighted Reddit material from Google search results by bypassing Google’s anti-scraping controls.
Engelmayer wrote in a Friday opinion that Reddit had plausibly alleged, at this early stage, a conspiracy in which SerpApi supplied a product designed to get around Google’s access controls and Perplexity paid to use it. That does not mean Reddit has proved the case. It means the court found enough in the complaint to let evidence gathering begin.
The ruling is awkward for SerpApi because another court recently dismissed a similar case brought by Google. In that case, the court found Google had not shown that rights holders such as Reddit had authorized Google to use anti-circumvention measures to protect their works in search results. Google told Ars Technica it planned to amend its complaint.
What is Reddit's DMCA lawsuit against SerpApi about?
Reddit’s claim turns on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention rules. In plain English: Reddit says Google had permission to display Reddit content under limits, Google used technical barriers to stop unwanted scraping, and SerpApi and Perplexity allegedly got around those barriers anyway.
Reddit’s theory also depends on its licensing arrangement with Google. According to Engelmayer, Reddit alleged more than a generic claim that Google licenses copyrighted material. Reddit said its deal with Google restricts how Reddit data can be used and requires partners to delete posts that Reddit flags after users remove them.
That deletion point is central to Reddit’s pitch. Reddit told the court that users delete millions of posts each month, and that unauthorized scraping can leave removed posts available inside Perplexity’s answer engine. For readers wondering why an AI company wants search snippets in the first place, systems that produce generated answers often rely on retrieved text as raw material; Kernel has a separate explainer on how LLMs work.
Engelmayer said it would be impractical to require companies to rewrite licensing contracts every time a partner deploys a new security tool. He also said the recent Google ruling did not defeat Reddit’s case because Reddit tied its claim to specific contractual limits on Reddit data.
What Reddit and SerpApi say now
Reddit praised the decision. A Reddit spokesperson said the ruling moved the company closer to holding “bad actors accountable” and said Reddit supports responsible access to public content while opposing companies that bypass its protections and profit from Reddit communities without permission.
Reddit is seeking injunctions that would block SerpApi and Perplexity from accessing Reddit and Google sites, stop alleged circumvention of Google SearchGuard, and restrict use of previously scraped data.
SerpApi’s lawyer, Jeff Homrig, told Ars Technica that the company remains confident. Homrig said SerpApi accesses public search results rather than Reddit’s platform, and argued that public information does not become protected merely because a platform wants to charge for it.
Perplexity AI did not immediately respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
The defendants did win part of the motion. Engelmayer dismissed Reddit’s unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims, finding them preempted by the Copyright Act.
The case is still early. Engelmayer noted that SerpApi and Perplexity may later show through discovery that Reddit never authorized Google to protect Reddit content in search results. A footnote in the opinion also suggested SerpApi could bolster its defense if it proves that all publicly available material in Google search results falls outside copyright protection.
Meredith Rose, a DMCA expert at Public Knowledge, told Ars Technica that Google and Reddit appear to be reaching for available legal tools in response to the rapid growth of AI scraping. Rose said Reddit’s position is unusual because it is not the copyright owner, exclusive licensee, or maker of the technical protection measure at issue, while also cautioning that DMCA outcomes can be hard to predict.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
