A federal judge threw out Google’s DMCA lawsuit against a 40-person scraping company — the same legal theory once used to stop people cracking DVD DRM. The irony writes itself: Google’s entire business was built on scraping the web. It’s suing a company for doing that to Google.
Google’s DMCA scraping case dismissal came down. Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the US District Court for the Northern District of California threw out Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi — a roughly 40-person company that scrapes Google Search results and resells them through an API. Google had argued that bypassing its bot-detection system, called SearchGuard, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions — the same legal theory written to stop people cracking DRM on DVDs. Gonzalez Rogers disagreed, and her ruling kills that specific theory permanently, though it leaves the door open for Google to refile under different legal grounds. SerpApi welcomed the outcome: “We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet’s founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation.”
What’s Happening & Why It Matters
The Irony in Google’s Case
Google’s DMCA scraping case dismissal carries a specific and noted irony that shaped much of the public reaction. Google’s entire business was built on scraping the web — the company’s core search product exists because Google’s crawlers systematically visit and index billions of pages across the internet, often without explicit permission from every individual site owner. Suing another company for doing to Google what Google has done to the rest of the internet for over two decades struck many observers, including tech commentator John Gruber, as a difficult position to defend on principle, regardless of the specific legal theory involved.
By contrast, Google’s complaint characterised SerpApi’s conduct in starker terms than simple reciprocity. Google called SerpApi’s business model “parasitic,” alleging the company generates billions of artificial requests, then copies and sells the responses without compensating Google for the infrastructure costs those automated requests impose. Google alleged SerpApi’s scraping violates Google’s governing terms of service and flouts the access restrictions Google conveys to automated crawlers through robots.txt instructions — a technical courtesy standard Google itself, respects when its own crawlers visit other sites.
Why the DMCA Theory Failed
Google’s DMCA scraping case dismissal turned on a precise legal distinction the court found decisive. Section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the DMCA prohibits circumventing “a technological measure that controls access to a work protected under this title.” Google argued its bot-detection systems — CAPTCHAs, rate limits, IP-fingerprinting — constitute that kind of technological access control, meaning SerpApi’s circumvention of those measures violated the statute, regardless of whether the underlying scraped content itself was independently copyrightable.
Gonzalez Rogers rejected that expansive reading of the DMCA’s scope. Her ruling addresses whether the anti-circumvention provisions can be stretched to cover access restrictions on otherwise public web pages — content anyone can view in a standard browser without logging in — rather than the copyrighted works, like DVD content, the statute was written to protect from unauthorised copying. Extending DMCA anti-circumvention liability to any bot-detection bypass would have created sweeping new legal exposure for scraping companies across the entire AI training-data ecosystem.
Reddit’s Related Case
Google’s DMCA scraping case dismissal does not resolve a separate, related legal battle involving the same defendant. Reddit sued SerpApi in October 2025, alongside co-defendants Perplexity AI, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy — which Reddit describes as a former Russian botnet — alleging an “industrial-scale, unlawful” operation to scrape Reddit user comments for commercial AI training purposes. Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, noted the stakes at the time: “Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.”
By contrast, Reddit’s case rests on the same DMCA anti-circumvention theory Gonzalez Rogers just rejected in Google’s dispute — meaning today’s ruling carries direct, unfavourable implications for Reddit’s own pending litigation against the identical defendant, even though the two cases are separate and are proceeding before different courts. Legal analysts tracking both cases note the reasoning behind Gonzalez Rogers’ ruling will factor into how the Reddit-SerpApi dispute resolves.
TF Summary: What’s Next
Google’s dismissal leaves the door open for the company to refile its claims against SerpApi under different legal theories, excluding the rejected DMCA anti-circumvention argument. Reddit’s separate lawsuit against SerpApi, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy continues in a different court, with nearly three hours of oral arguments already held over whether Reddit has standing to sue on behalf of its users. SerpApi continues operating its scraping API service throughout both proceedings.
MY FORECAST: Google’s DMCA scraping case dismissal will not end Google’s effort to restrict unauthorised scraping of its search results — expect the company to refile under alternative legal theories, centred on breach of contract or unfair competition claims rather than the foreclosed DMCA anti-circumvention route. By contrast, the ruling’s more significant consequence is on Reddit’s parallel case against the same defendant, where the shared DMCA theory faces a direct, unfavourable precedent from within the same legal ecosystem. Expect the ruling to be cited across the growing wave of AI training-data scraping litigation TF has tracked throughout 2026 — the core question of whether bot-detection circumvention constitutes DMCA infringement, rather than a narrower contract or trespass claim, has a weaker foundation for every plaintiff pursuing that specific legal path.
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