"Last week, Google filed suit against SerpApi, a scraping company that helps businesses pull data from Google search results. The lawsuit claims SerpApi violated DMCA Section 1201 by circumventing Google's "technological protection measures" to access search results-and the copyrighted content within them-without permission. There's just one problem with this theory: Google built its entire business on scraping the web without asking permission first."
"The lawsuit comes on the heels of Reddit's equally problematic anti-scraping suit from October -which we called an attack on the open internet. Reddit sued Perplexity and various scraping firms (including SerpApi), claiming they violated 1201 by circumventing... Google's technological protections. Reddit was mad it had cut a multi-million dollar licensing deal with Google for access to Reddit content, and these firms were routing around both that deal and Google itself to provide similar results to users."
Google filed suit against SerpApi, alleging violations of DMCA Section 1201 by circumventing technological protection measures to access search results and the copyrighted content within them without permission. The suit targets how SerpApi gets around attempts to block scraping and seeks to stop bots that deliver search-result data. Google is invoking a provision commonly used to prevent circumvention of access controls. Similar litigation recently arose when Reddit sued Perplexity and scraping firms, asserting 1201 violations related to circumvention of Google's protections after a licensing deal with Google. The overlapping suits raise questions about consistency when companies that rely on unconsented scraping assert anti-circumvention rights.
Read at Above the Law
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