{"slug": "reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion", "title": "Reddit lawsuit against SerpApi survives dismissal motion", "summary": "A federal judge largely denied SerpApi's motion to dismiss Reddit's Digital Millennium Copyright Act lawsuit on July 31, 2026, allowing claims that SerpApi and Perplexity AI conspired to scrape Reddit content via Google search results for AI training without licensing. US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled Reddit plausibly pleaded the conspiracy, marking a contrast to Google's separate DMCA case against SerpApi, which was dismissed on July 20, 2026, for lack of standing. Reddit, which went public in March 2024 and relies on data licensing revenue, seeks damages and injunctive relief.", "body_md": "Via searchenginejournal.com\n\n# Reddit lawsuit against SerpApi survives dismissal motion\n\nA federal judge lets Reddit's DMCA claims proceed, putting AI data scraping practices under serious legal pressure\n\nA federal judge handed Reddit a meaningful legal win on July 31, 2026, largely denying a motion to dismiss from web scraping service SerpApi. The ruling means Reddit’s core claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act move forward.\n\n## What the court actually decided\n\nUS District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, sitting in the Southern District of New York, ruled that Reddit had plausibly pleaded a conspiracy between SerpApi and Perplexity AI. The alleged arrangement: SerpApi provided a product capable of circumventing Google’s access controls, and Perplexity AI paid for it.\n\nReddit argues that instead of scraping Reddit directly, Perplexity routed its data collection through Google search results, using SerpApi as the technical middleman. The effect, Reddit claims, was industrial-scale harvesting of hundreds of billions of search results containing user posts and comments for AI training, without a licensing agreement or a dollar changing hands to Reddit.\n\nThe lawsuit was originally filed on October 22, 2025. Beyond SerpApi and Perplexity AI, Reddit’s complaint names Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy as additional defendants.\n\nReddit says the unauthorized activity cost it real money, specifically in lost licensing revenue and the operational expense of building new security measures to defend its content. The company is seeking both damages and injunctive relief.\n\n## The Google subplot adds a twist\n\nJust eleven days before Engelmayer denied SerpApi’s dismissal motion, a separate DMCA lawsuit filed by Google against SerpApi was dismissed on July 20, 2026. The reason: lack of standing, meaning Google couldn’t demonstrate it was the right party to bring that particular claim.\n\nReddit’s case survived on the merits of its pleading, which is a meaningfully different result from Google’s case failing on a procedural technicality.\n\n## Why this matters for AI companies\n\nReddit went public in March 2024 and has since leaned heavily into data licensing as a core revenue strategy, signing licensing agreements with several AI firms. A successful lawsuit outcome reinforces that argument and gives Reddit leverage in future licensing negotiations.\n\nPerplexity AI, which is privately held, has faced a string of copyright-related accusations over the past year. Reddit’s stock performance and its ability to grow licensing revenue are now partially tied to how this litigation resolves.\n\n**Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our\n\n[Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion", "canonical_source": "https://cryptobriefing.com/reddit-serpapi-lawsuit-survives-dismissal/", "published_at": "2026-07-31 21:24:42+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-31 21:36:53.683073+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-ethics", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Reddit", "SerpApi", "Perplexity AI", "Paul A. Engelmayer", "Google", "Oxylabs UAB", "AWMProxy"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/reddit-lawsuit-against-serpapi-survives-dismissal-motion.jsonld"}}