“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win
Ars Technica AI · Ashley Belanger · 2026-07-27
Google confirms it will continue its DMCA-based legal fight against web scraper SerpApi after losing a court ruling, with Reddit joining the effort, as Google argues that anti-scraping technology constitutes copyright protection for content appearing in its search results.
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Extraction
Topics: web-scrapingdmcaai-data-rightscopyright-lawgoogle
Claims
- Google lost a court case against SerpApi but confirmed it will continue appealing to block the web scraper from commercializing scraped Google search results.
- Google sued SerpApi under the DMCA, arguing its anti-scraping technology constitutes a copy-protection mechanism and that circumventing it violates copyright law.
- Reddit is participating alongside Google in the legal effort against AI web scraping, despite not being a direct party to the SerpApi dispute.
- SerpApi sells access to an unauthorized commercial API built on content scraped from Google search results, including from knowledge panels containing licensed third-party content.
Key quotes
Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December.
According to Google, the anti-scraping tech was in place to protect copyrighted content in search results.