Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A judge dismissed Google's DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit against data scraper SerpAPI.
A federal judge dismissed Google's DMCA 1201 lawsuit against SerpAPI, which scrapes Google search results. The court ruled that Google's SearchGuard anti-bot measure does not effectively control access to copyrighted works, as many search results contain no copyrighted content. Google also failed to show SearchGuard was deployed with copyright owners' authority. The dismissal is without prejudice, allowing Google to refile on narrower claims involving copyrighted content like Knowledge Panels. The ruling highlights tension between Google's history of web scraping and its efforts to block others from scraping its results.
What commenters are saying
The thread is sharply divided. One camp sees Google's lawsuit as hypocritical, noting Google built its empire by scraping the web. Another argues SerpAPI's methods, which include using end-user proxies and ignoring robots.txt, are unethical. Some commenters point out Google has deprecated its search API and now charges for programmatic access, leaving scraping as the only option. A few note that EU regulators may force Google to share search data, potentially rendering the lawsuit moot. Others highlight that the ruling also reinforces Google's own scraping as legal.