The largest web scraper on the planet just lost a lawsuit against a smaller web scraper. Google — a company that built its empire crawling every corner of the internet — sued SerpApi for doing essentially the same thing to Google’s own search results. A federal judge tossed most of the case. This isn’t an obscure copyright footnote. Reddit’s parallel lawsuit sits on the same shaky foundation, and the outcome shapes who controls public information in the age of AI training, journalism, and research.
The Legal Theory That Fell Apart
A 1998 anti-piracy statute turned out to be a poor fit for fencing off public search results.
When Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers reviewed Google’s claims in July 2026, the math didn’t add up. Google had sued SerpApi in December 2025, arguing that SerpApi’s search-results API circumvented anti-scraping technology — framing bot-blocking tools as copyright protection under the DMCA. The judge dismissed those claims, finding Google lacks standing because it simply doesn’t own the copyright in search results.
Here’s what the ruling established:
- Google’s anti-scraping system doesn’t qualify as a DMCA “technological protection measure” for content Google doesn’t hold copyright over
- Claims tied to non-copyrighted search results were dismissed permanently — no amendments allowed
- A narrow sliver survives: licensed knowledge panel content where Google holds explicit rights-holder authorization
- SerpApi serves Nvidia, Uber, and Adobe — hardly a rogue scraping outfit
- Meredith Rose of Public Knowledge confirmed “It really boiled down to Google didn’t allege enough about what it was protecting that was copyrighted,” per Ars Technica
Stripped of its copyright foundation, Google’s case revealed a core absurdity. Rose calls the DMCA approach “bizarre” — platforms grasping at whatever legal tool is within reach, wielding a 1998 anti-piracy statute like a Swiss Army knife for problems it was never designed to solve.
While Google frames its planned amended complaint as a narrow fix around knowledge panels, Rose warns this path is a trap of Google’s own making. Arguing those panels are packed with copyrighted material risks admitting Google from handling licensed content without authorization elsewhere — potentially inviting new infringement fights. For its part, Google’s spokesperson said the company is “pleased to see that the Court rejected nearly all of SerpApi’s legal arguments” and intends to press forward with the amended filing.
Reddit’s Turn – and the Same Shaky Ground
Reddit faces a structurally identical copyright standing problem — because its users, not Reddit, own their posts.
Reddit’s October 2025 lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity AI claimed scrapers evaded “two levels of security” — Reddit’s own platform controls and Google’s SERP-level protections. But after Google’s loss, Reddit confronts the same structural problem. Reddit doesn’t own its users’ posts. Courts confirmed this principle directly in X Corp. v. Bright Data, and the DMCA standing requirements — copyright owner, exclusive licensee, or deployer of the protection measure — are hurdles Reddit cannot clear for content living inside Google’s search results.
“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 (via SerpApi blog)
Rose describes the broader pattern as a “re-enclosure of a lot of the web” — like watching someone fence off a public park and charge admission after the “API apocalypse” of 2023 accelerated platform lockdowns. Researchers, journalists, and archivists lose access alongside AI companies. Courts keep narrowing DMCA and CFAA as fences around public data. Platforms that can’t win in court will push for new legislation or force data behind logins and paywalls instead. The open web didn’t get saved by this ruling. It just bought itself a little more time before the next gate goes up.
