Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive

Ars Technica reports that a federal judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from SerpApi, a web scraper accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to scrape Reddit's copyrighted content from Google search results. The judge found that Reddit has plausibly alleged a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing tools to circumvent access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it. The ruling came less than two weeks after another court dismissed Google's nearly identical DMCA lawsuit, finding that Google hadn't proven rights holders like Reddit had authorized preventing scraping. SerpApi disputes this framing, saying that Google and Reddit are trying to 'use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content they didn't author and don't own.'

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