SerpApi Fights Reddit Scraping Lawsuit in Court

A legal battle between SerpApi and Reddit is raising fundamental questions about data ownership, copyright law, and the boundaries of web scraping. The core dispute centers on whether a platform can control how information from its public pages, once indexed by search engines, is accessed and used by third-party services. SerpApi has formally asked a federal court to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit, arguing the social media giant is overreaching by attempting to control user posts and public search results through copyright claims it may not legally hold.

The motion to dismiss follows Reddit’s amended complaint from February. SerpApi contends this updated filing still fails to establish three critical points: Reddit’s copyright ownership over the content in question, any circumvention of technical protections, or evidence of concrete harm. In a detailed blog post, SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy laid out the company’s defense, highlighting several perceived flaws in Reddit’s legal position.

A primary argument is that Reddit doesn’t own most of the content cited in the lawsuit. The platform’s own user agreement states that individuals retain ownership of their posts, granting Reddit only a non-exclusive license. Furthermore, SerpApi points out that the specific snippets referenced in the complaint, such as dates, addresses, and short text fragments, are likely not copyrightable on their own. Crucially, SerpApi emphasizes that its service accesses publicly available Google Search pages, not Reddit’s servers directly, to retrieve information.

Regarding allegations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Khaleghy strongly disputes Reddit’s claim of circumvention. He argues that SerpApi simply retrieves the same search results any person would see by typing a query into Google. The company states it does not break encryption or bypass authentication measures. Accessing public webpages, in its view, does not constitute “circumvention” as defined by the DMCA. SerpApi also notes that Reddit’s own privacy policy acknowledges public posts may appear in search engine results, undermining the claim that this access is unauthorized.

This lawsuit is part of a broader surge in legal conflicts over data scraping, particularly for artificial intelligence training. The timeline is telling. In October, Reddit filed suit against SerpApi, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy, accusing them of scraping Reddit content via Google Search at scale. Reddit claimed it had set a “trap” by planting a post visible only to Google’s crawler, which later appeared in a Perplexity response. SerpApi quickly vowed to fight back, calling the allegations inflammatory. The legal pressure intensified in December when Google itself sued SerpApi, alleging it bypassed bot protections to scrape licensed search features. SerpApi moved to dismiss Google’s suit in February, arguing it misuses the DMCA to restrict public data.

The stakes of this case are significant for the tech industry. It serves as a key test for determining whether companies can legally extract information from public search results without violating copyright or anti-circumvention laws. The final ruling could have profound implications for the development of SEO tools and the sourcing of data for AI models, potentially reshaping how public web information is utilized.

The immediate next step rests with the court, which must decide whether Reddit’s amended complaint has enough merit to proceed. If the judge grants SerpApi’s motion and dismisses the case with prejudice, Reddit’s claims against the company in this specific lawsuit would come to an end. The outcome will be closely watched as a precedent for platform control versus open access to information that users have voluntarily made public.

(Source: Search Engine Land)