A U.S. district judge has denied a motion to dismiss Reddit's lawsuit against SerpApi, a web scraper accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. In his opinion, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it. "The Google Decision is not to the contrary" of Reddit’s case because, unlike Google, Reddit went "beyond the bare allegation" that Google used to broadly claim that it generally "has licenses to display copyrighted content," according to Engelmayer. Reddit argued that its licensing agreement with Google directly prohibits certain uses of Reddit data that are now being accessed due to the circumvention methods employed by malicious web scrapers. Specifically, Reddit argued that when it licenses content to partners like Google, its partners agree to delete posts that Reddit flags when users remove content. According to Reddit, "millions of posts" are deleted monthly, and unsanctioned efforts like SerpApi’s partnership with Perplexity AI make it impossible for Reddit to protect its promise to users to honor content removals. And allowing deleted posts to fester in Perplexity AI’s answer engine allegedly harms Reddit’s reputation, as well as its profits, Reddit successfully argued. The fight is seemingly far from over, though, with Engelmayer noting that SerpApi and Perplexity AI may prove through discovery that Reddit never authorized Google to protect its content in search results. SerpApi may also strengthen its defense if it can prove that all publicly accessible content in Google search results is not protected by the Copyright Act, a footnote in Engelmayer’s opinion suggested. Last week, a DMCA expert with Public Knowledge, Meredith Rose, told Ars that Google and Reddit seemed to be "sort of grasping at whatever tool is available" in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And Reddit in particular appeared weirdly positioned in its DMCA claim because "the judge in the Google case said, 'Well, in order to have standing to bring a lawsuit under the DMCA, you can be the copyright owner or the exclusive licensee or the person who is deploying and manufacturing the technological protection measure at issue,'" Rose told Ars. And confusingly, "Reddit is none of those things." But Rose did acknowledge that DMCA rulings seemed to be more about "vibes," suggesting that it may be hard to predict a winner or loser in this fight just yet. This week wasn’t a total loss for SerpApi and Perplexity AI, which did manage to get Reddit’s unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims tossed, since they were both preempted by the Copyright Act. Asked for comment, Jeff Homrig, a lawyer for SerpApi, told Ars that "we remain confident in our position. The court has decided to hear the facts; the facts are on our side. SerpApi accesses public search results, not Reddit’s platform, and public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it. We look forward to making that case." Perplexity AI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
Source: arstechnica
