Reddit's DMCA lawsuit against web scraper SerpApi survives early court challenge

A federal judge has allowed Reddit's copyright lawsuit against web scraper SerpApi to move forward, rejecting a motion to dismiss the case despite a recent court setback for Google's parallel action against the same defendants.

The Ruling#

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer determined that Reddit has sufficiently alleged a conspiracy involving SerpApi supplying tools to circumvent Google's access controls while Perplexity AI paid for the service. In his opinion, the judge found the claim plausible enough to warrant proceeding past the early dismissal stage.

The Contested Framework#

Both Reddit and Google must establish three key elements under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: that the defendants conspired to access protected content; that copyright materials were shielded by technological access controls; and that these controls were intentionally circumvented.

Google recently failed to clear this threshold entirely, losing its case when a court found no evidence that rights holders had authorized Google to deploy anti-circumvention technology in the first place. However, Engelmayer's decision validates Reddit's alternative argument—that the platform itself had authorized such protections. This distinction may prove crucial to both cases going forward.

A Contradiction at the Heart#

The reasoning creates an awkward tension: Engelmayer accepted that Reddit could authorize anti-circumvention measures through Google, yet the technology Reddit now points to wasn't invented until more than a year after the two companies signed their initial licensing agreement. SerpApi has criticized the approach, arguing that Google and Reddit are "use[ing] the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn't author and don't own."

Google signaled plans to rework its complaint to survive the earlier dismissal, keeping its own uncertain fight alive alongside Reddit's advance.