Judge Dismisses Google's DMCA Anti-Scraping Lawsuit Against SerpAPI
Original: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
Why This Matters
The ruling limits use of DMCA 1201 as a tool to restrict web scraping, with broad implications for open data access and AI training pipelines.
A federal judge dismissed Google's DMCA Section 1201 lawsuit against SerpAPI, which had accused the company of unlawfully circumventing Google's technological protection measures to scrape search result pages. The court found Google lacked a legitimate copyright claim, though the dismissal allows for refiling.
A federal judge has dismissed Google's DMCA Section 1201 (anti-circumvention) lawsuit against SerpAPI, a service that builds unauthorized APIs from scraped search engine results pages. Google had filed the lawsuit in early 2026, arguing that SerpAPI bypassed its technological protection measures in violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The court rejected this framing, concluding that scraping an open website does not constitute a valid Section 1201 violation and that Google lacked a legitimate copyright claim over its search results pages. The dismissal was issued without prejudice, meaning Google may refile. The case is closely related to a parallel lawsuit Reddit filed against SerpAPI and others — including AI search company Perplexity — alleging that SerpAPI's scraping of Google indirectly exposed Reddit user content. Critics had noted that Reddit holds no copyright over user-generated posts, and SerpAPI was scraping Google, not Reddit directly. Legal observers have flagged both suits as attempts to use DMCA 1201 — originally designed to protect digital rights management (DRM) systems — to restrict AI-era data access, drawing comparisons to prior failed attempts by companies like Lexmark to weaponize Section 1201 against third-party product compatibility.