Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive
Ars Technica Ashley Belanger ● Covered by 2 sources
Reddit's DMCA case against SerpApi and Perplexity AI survives another round in court. But it just lost two other claims, and even the legal footing left looks shaky.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger — read the original for the full story.
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A judge has let Reddit keep swinging in its unusual copyright fight over Google search results, even as the case starts to look wobblier by the week. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer's ruling means SerpApi and Perplexity AI now head into discovery, where they'll try to dig up something that could sink Reddit's whole theory: proof that Reddit never actually authorized Google to protect its content in search results in the first place.
Engelmayer also tucked a notable hint into a footnote, suggesting SerpApi's defense could get stronger if it can show that publicly accessible content sitting in Google search results simply isn't covered by the Copyright Act at all. That's a big if, but it's the kind of opening a defendant loves to see in a judge's opinion.
Meredith Rose, a DMCA expert at Public Knowledge, told Ars last week that Google and Reddit look like they're grabbing whatever legal tool happens to be within reach as AI scraping has exploded over the past three years. Reddit's position looks especially odd, she said, because the same judge in the related Google case laid out exactly who has standing to sue under the DMCA: the copyright owner, an exclusive licensee, or whoever built the technological protection measure in question. Reddit, in Rose's words, is none of those things.
Still, Rose wasn't ready to call a winner. She described DMCA rulings as often coming down to "vibes" more than airtight legal logic, which makes this fight genuinely hard to predict right now.
It wasn't all bad news for the defendants this week, either. SerpApi and Perplexity AI got Reddit's unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims thrown out entirely, since both were found to be preempted by the Copyright Act. SerpApi's lawyer, Jeff Homrig, told Ars the company remains confident, arguing that SerpApi pulls from public search results rather than Reddit's platform directly, and that information doesn't suddenly become protected just because a platform wants to charge for it. Perplexity AI didn't respond to a request for comment.
Worth flagging: Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica's parent company Condé Nast, is also Reddit's largest shareholder.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Reddit picking a legal theory this shaky says a lot about how desperate platforms have gotten to control data they don't fully own once it's sitting in a public search index. If a judge is already pointing out in a footnote that Reddit might not even have standing, that's not a company operating from strength, that's a company hoping the process itself becomes the punishment. Public information staying public, even when a company wants to monetize access to it later, is not a radical idea, and SerpApi's argument on that point deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as scraper-industry spin.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
