“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win - Ars Technica
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After a big court loss last week, Google has confirmed that it won’t give up its fight to block AI bots from scraping its search results. And Reddit is weirdly along for the ride.
Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December. The search giant accused the web scraper of circumventing its anti-scraping technology and then selling content scraped from Google search results through an unauthorized “Google Search API” software service.
According to Google, the anti-scraping tech was in place to protect copyrighted content in search results. Allegedly, SerpApi’s circumvention threatened to disrupt Google’s relationships with rights holders, including some who license content to Google to appear in so-called “knowledge panels” that are displayed in some search results for well-known people or entities.
It was an odd use of the DMCA, since Google search results can’t be copyrighted. But Google was apparently emboldened to explore the legal theory after Reddit filed a very similar lawsuit in October, accusing SerpApi and Google-rival Perplexity of scraping Reddit content that appears in Google results.
In a blog, Google cited Reddit’s lawsuit when announcing its own challenge, which it said it filed as a “last resort” to block “malicious scraping” that violates rights holders’ choices over who can access their content.
Specifically, Google alleged that SerpApi’s circumvention violated its terms and made it impossible to profit from—or offset the cost of—“billions” of bot searches. And before it, Reddit claimed that SerpApi was evading two levels of security: Reddit’s own controls blocking scraping on its platform and Google controls blocking scraping of Reddit content in search results.
Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with expertise in the DMCA for a nonprofit public interest group called Public Knowledge, told Ars that Google and Reddit seem to be “sort of grasping at whatever tool is available” in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And while the way they’re using the DMCA is “bizarre”—and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case”—she says it’s not “surprising.” Historically, the DMCA has been an effective tool to quickly stop disfavored content uses and force discussions around licensing, so turning to it may have been an obvious starting point, given Google’s goals.
But Google’s and Reddit’s unusual DMCA arguments don’t seem to be winning ones. Last week, a court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.
“That does not happen terribly often,” Rose told Ars. “It really boiled down to Google didn’t allege enough about what it was protecting that was copyrighted.”
Likely the timing of that decision wasn’t great for Reddit, which faced a hearing on SerpApi’s motion to dismiss its lawsuit last Thursday. It’s unclear which way the court will rule in that case, but Rose told Ars that the Google ruling doesn’t bode well for Reddit since Reddit can’t claim that it is the content owner or exclusive licensee of content in search results.
“The judge in the Google case said, ‘Well, in order to have standing to bring a lawsuit under the DMCA, you can be the copyright owner or the exclusive licensee or the person who is deploying and manufacturing the technological protection measure at issue,’” Rose told Ars. “Reddit is none of those things.”
SerpApi is hoping that the fight will be over soon, telling Ars that the costly legal battle is worth sticking it out to defend the open web.
“The bottom line is that both Google and Reddit appear to be engaged in attempts 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,” SerpApi told Ars.
Google’s last chance to keep fight alive
Although Rose agreed with SerpApi that, in granting the motion to dismiss, the court gave SerpApi a big win, the fight is not over yet, as Google has a narrow path forward to keep its war against web scraping alive.
Google acknowledged that search results can’t be copyrighted but argued that “knowledge panels” sometimes include copyrighted content that...