SerpApi asks court to dismiss Google web scraping lawsuit • The Register

SerpApi, a Texas-based internet scraping firm, has requested a California court docket to dismiss Google’s declare that that it bypassed digital locks to collect copyrighted content material in Google Search outcomes.

“Google is the biggest scraper on this planet,” the corporate stated in a blog post on Friday. “Google’s total enterprise started with an online crawler that visited each publicly accessible web page on the web, copied the content material, listed it, and served it again to customers. It did this with out distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted materials, and it did this with out asking permission. Now Google is in federal court docket claiming that our scraping is prohibited.”

Google in December 2025 sued SerpApi [PDF], alleging that its internet scraping circumvents the safety measures Google put in place to guard copyrighted materials surfaced in search outcomes. This was two months after Reddit filed a similar lawsuit towards Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpApi claiming the defendants had violated its personal controls and Google’s defenses.

Google did so alleging violations of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), particularly Circumvention of Technological Measures (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)) and Trafficking in Know-how Designed for Circumvention of Technological Measures (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2)).

“SerpApi deceptively takes content material that Google licenses from others (like photographs that seem in Data Panels, real-time information in Search options and far more), after which resells it for a payment,” stated Google basic counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado when the lawsuit was announced. “In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of internet sites and suppliers whose content material seems in Search.”

Invited to remark, a Google spokesperson pointed to Prado’s submit.

The query is whether or not the mechanism Google employs to forestall scraping qualifies as a technological safety measure below the regulation, and whether or not SerpApi’s crawling system unlawfully circumvents that safety. 

It is a query that has turn into vastly necessary in gentle of accelerating efforts to reap information from web sites and to deploy counter-measures, each technical and authorized.

Google in its criticism refers to its anti-scraping know-how as SearchGuard and claims that SerpApi discovered a means round it.

“With the automated queries it submits, SerpApi engages in all kinds of misrepresentations and evasions with a purpose to bypass the technological protections Google deployed,” Google’s criticism explains. “However every time it employs these artifices, SerpApi violates federal regulation.”

SerpApi disagrees, insisting that Google’s authorized broadside is just an try to guard its enterprise pursuits.

The DMCA’s definition of a technical safety measure is restricted. And in keeping with SerpApi, SearchGuard would not meet that definition.

“The DMCA defines circumvention exactly: it means ‘to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or in any other case to keep away from, bypass, take away, deactivate, or impair a technological measure,” the corporate says. “Learn that fastidiously. Descramble. Decrypt. Impair.”

SerpApi maintains it does none of these issues, asserting that it accesses publicly seen internet pages, with out breaking encryption, disabling authentication techniques, or accessing personal information.

To help its argument, the corporate cites hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. and Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, instances which have affirmed the lawfulness of scraping public information and denied the applicability of DMCA anti-circumvention provisions to in any other case public works.

SerpApi’s motion to dismiss [PDF] argues that its internet scraping will not be circumvention below the DMCA, simply as Google’s personal internet scraping is not circumvention.

“The DMCA prevents hacking: the ‘digital equal of breaking right into a locked room,'” the corporate’s movement states. “…However Google doesn’t allege unscrambling or decryption of any work, or the impairment, deactivation, or removing of any entry system. It solely alleges that SerpApi ‘solved’ JavaScript challenges or CAPTCHAs or in any other case mimicked a human-controlled browser in ways in which ‘misled’ Google into offering search outcomes. However that’s not the equal of breaking a lock or drilling by a wall to acquire a replica of a guide. Mimicry will not be a violation.”

In January, SerpApi made the same argument towards Reddit in its Memorandum of Law [PDF] that accompanies its movement to dismiss Reddit’s criticism. Reddit’s first amended complaint [PDF], filed earlier this month, continues to depend on DMCA violation claims.

Tori Noble, workers legal professional on the Digital Frontier Basis instructed The Register in an e mail that scraping public data is important for the functioning of the web.

“The precise to scrape publicly accessible data retains the Web free and open,” she stated. “The DMCA undermines internet freedom by chilling lawful scraping for analysis, expression, innovation, and extra. When firms like Google try to depend on overly expansive interpretations of DMCA to guard their enterprise fashions, everybody suffers.”

Noble added, “SerpApi is an EFF donor. Nevertheless, EFF takes its independence significantly and donors by no means information any of our work, together with commentary on authorized instances that fall inside our problem areas.”

With regard to latest litigation involving AI information gathering, courts have been reluctant to restrict internet scraping. In December, US District Decide Sidney Stein rejected [PDF] Ziff Davis’s bid to have the court docket deal with OpenAI’s flouting of robots.txt directives throughout its internet scraping as circumvention below the DMCA.

Given the monetary stakes concerned, the inapplicability of copyright guidelines to halt aggressive scraping appears prone to invigorate efforts to separate human guests from bots. However with AI bots getting higher at autonomous and human-delegated exercise on-line, it is tough to see websites will have the ability to hold the bots away with something much less iron-clad contractual agreements or the kind of full-blown authentication envisioned by the DMCA. ®