After a big court loss last week, Google has confirmed that it won’t give up its fight to block AI bots from scraping its search results. And Reddit is weirdly along for the ride.
Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December. The search giant accused the web scraper of circumventing its anti-scraping technology and then selling content scraped from Google search results through an unauthorized “Google Search API” software service.
According to Google, the anti-scraping tech was in place to protect copyrighted content in search results. Allegedly, SerpApi’s circumvention threatened to disrupt Google’s relationships with rights holders, including some who license content to Google to appear in so-called “knowledge panels” that are displayed in some search results for well-known people or entities.
It was an odd use of the DMCA, since Google search results can’t be copyrighted. But Google was apparently emboldened to explore the legal theory after Reddit filed a very similar lawsuit in October, accusing SerpApi and Google-rival Perplexity of scraping Reddit content that appears in Google results.
In a blog, Google cited Reddit’s lawsuit when announcing its own challenge, which it said it filed as a “last resort” to block “malicious scraping” that violates rights holders’ choices over who can access their content.
Specifically, Google alleged that SerpApi’s circumvention violated its terms and made it impossible to profit from—or offset the cost of—“billions” of bot searches. And before it, Reddit claimed that SerpApi was evading two levels of security: Reddit’s own controls blocking scraping on its platform and Google controls blocking scraping of Reddit content in search results.
Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with expertise in the DMCA for a nonprofit public interest group called Public Knowledge, told Ars that Google and Reddit seem to be “sort of grasping at whatever tool is available” in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And while the way they’re using the DMCA is “bizarre”—and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case”—she says it’s not “surprising.” Historically, the DMCA has been an effective tool to quickly stop disfavored content uses and force discussions around licensing, so turning to it may have been an obvious starting point, given Google’s goals.