Reddit’s DMCA Case Against Scrapers Survives, Despite Google’s Earlier Loss

A federal judge has allowed most of Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI, SerpApi and other data-scraping companies to move forward. Reddit claims the defendants circumvented technical barriers to obtain user posts, including by collecting Reddit material appearing within Google search results.

The decision is notable because Google recently stumbled while making a similar argument against SerpApi. In that case, the court questioned whether Google could use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to protect search results largely assembled from public facts and material Google did not own. Reddit faces an added ownership problem because its users generally retain the copyrights to their posts.

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer nevertheless found that Reddit had adequately alleged standing and unlawful circumvention at this early stage. The ruling does not establish that Perplexity or the scraping companies broke the law. It means Reddit’s central claims can proceed into discovery, while several secondary claims were dismissed.

For SEOs and data providers, the unresolved question is larger than Reddit or AI training: Can a website use copyright law to restrict automated access to publicly visible information it does not fully own? The Google and Reddit cases are now producing different early answers, leaving the legality of search-result scraping unsettled. Read the reports from Ars Technica and Reuters.