A federal court dismissed the Google SerpAPI DMCA lawsuit over automated scraping of Google Search results, finding that Google had not tied its anti-circumvention claims to copyright-protected material in the way Section 1201 requires. The dismissal is not the final word: the court allowed Google to amend its complaint.
Google sued SerpApi after accusing the company of bypassing systems meant to stop automated access to search result pages. SerpApi offers tools that let customers retrieve search engine result pages through an unofficial API, a business that sits squarely in the current fight over who gets to extract data from public-facing websites.
The case turned on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention rules, known as Section 1201. That part of the law targets bypassing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. Google argued that SerpApi’s scraping got around its access controls. SerpApi argued that Google was trying to stretch copyright law into a general anti-scraping weapon.
Why did the court dismiss Google's DMCA claims?
The court said Google’s complaint did not show that its system controlled access to a work protected by copyright across the search results at issue. According to the court, Google described search results as compilations of publicly available internet information organized for users, and did not allege that Google.com or the displayed search results themselves were protected under the Copyright Act.
Google did allege that some search results may include a Knowledge Panel containing licensed copyrighted material, such as images. The court found that was not enough for the broad claim Google brought, because Google did not allege that Knowledge Panels appear in every result or that they always contain copyrighted content.
That distinction did most of the damage. The court held that Section 1201 does not apply when the technological measure controls access to material that is not protected by copyright. As a result, Google’s claims were dismissed to the extent they were based on search results without copyrighted content.
What is SearchGuard?
Google described SearchGuard as a system that sends a JavaScript challenge when search queries come from sources it does not recognize. A normal user’s browser can run the code and return information Google calls a solve, while large automated systems often cannot, which lets Google deny those systems access to search results.
The court’s problem was not that SearchGuard failed as a bot-control tool. The problem was legal fit. Section 1201 requires a measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work with the authority of the copyright owner. The court said Google had not alleged facts showing that SearchGuard was implemented and operated with that required copyright-holder authority.
Google argued that it did not need to plead those facts because the statutory phrase concerns who may bypass a protection measure, rather than who may deploy it. The court rejected that reading, saying Google relied on cases interpreting a different subsection of the DMCA.
SerpApi did not win every argument it made, but it won enough to knock out the DMCA claims for now. The ruling leaves Google room to file a narrower version aimed at specific copyrighted elements, rather than search result pages as a whole.
The dispute also overlaps with a separate case brought by Reddit against SerpApi and others, including Perplexity. Reddit alleged that SerpApi’s scraping of Google enabled access to Reddit content and violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. That case, according to the reporting on the litigation, is still proceeding while defendants pursue dismissal.
After the ruling, SerpApi said it was pleased the court rejected what it called Google’s effort to expand the DMCA to control access to public pages. The company said it would continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers and businesses that rely on public search information.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
