SerpApi yesterday filed a movement to dismiss Google’s federal lawsuit over internet scraping, turning the case right into a direct problem to the search big’s standing to invokecopyright regulation to guard what the Texas firm calls publicly accessible data. The submitting, submitted to the US District Courtroom for the Northern District of California on February 20, 2026, frames the dispute not merely as a technical authorized skirmish however as a elementary query about who controls entry to the general public web.

The case, assigned case quantity 25-cv-10826-YGR earlier than Decide Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, is scheduled for a listening to on Could 19, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. in Courtroom 1 on the fourth flooring of the federal courthouse. SerpApi is represented by Proskauer Rose LLP, with lead counsel Joseph E. Clark of the agency’s New York workplace.

Google had filed the underlying lawsuit on December 19, 2025, alleging that SerpApi violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing SearchGuard, Google’s bot-detection system, to scrape search outcomes on what the criticism describes as “billions of separate events.” Google’s criticism sought statutory damages starting from $200 to $2,500 for every circumvention act. The go well with got here after Google had eliminated the n=100 SERP parameter on September 14, 2025, a transfer that considerably impacted how instruments entry search outcome information.

Google’s standing is the central problem

SerpApi’s movement rests on seven authorized questions, the primary and arguably most decisive being whether or not Google has any standing to carry a DMCA declare in any respect. The argument is pointed: the DMCA is a copyright safety statute, not a mechanism for web site operators to regulate who can entry publicly accessible data.

Based on the movement, “Google doesn’t maintain a copyright in its search outcomes. It shows different folks’s data – data they selected to make publicly accessible.” The submitting argues that Google is an internet site operator and, at most, a non-exclusive licensee of sure pictures that seem in its Data Panels. Neither of these roles, the movement contends, falls throughout the “zone of pursuits” that Congress sought to guard when it enacted the DMCA.

The authorized framework SerpApi invokes right here is the Supreme Courtroom’s 2014 ruling in Lexmark Worldwide, Inc. v. Static Management Parts, Inc., which established that statutory standing requires a plaintiff to indicate accidents that “fall throughout the zone of pursuits protected by the regulation invoked.” Google’s accidents as a search engine operator – infrastructure prices, decreased promoting income from automated queries – will not be, based on SerpApi, the sorts of accidents the DMCA was designed to redress.

The movement attracts a pointy analogy: “Extending standing to web site operators could be akin to allowing the locksmith or dwelling builder to sue simply because a guide occurs to take a seat inside the home. The statute protects the guide’s writer, not the architect.”

The $7 trillion drawback

One of many extra placing passages within the 31-page submitting includes the arithmetic of Google’s personal idea. Based on SerpApi’s movement, if Google’s interpretation of the DMCA had been appropriate – treating every of billions of automated queries as a separate circumvention act – the ensuing statutory damages would exceed $7 trillion. That determine surpasses United States gross home product.

Based on SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy’s accompanying weblog publish, “when you do the mathematics, even utilizing the minimal numbers alleged, Google’s DMCA statutory damages would quantity to a mere $7.06 trillion.” The movement itself makes use of that determine as proof that Congress by no means meant the DMCA to be utilized this fashion. Penalties of that magnitude, the argument runs, are a sign of statutory misapplication fairly than respectable copyright enforcement.

The size of potential legal responsibility had already been flagged as a distinguishing characteristic of this case when it was first filed. PPC Land’s earlier coverage noted that potential statutory legal responsibility may theoretically exceed SerpApi’s means to pay given the huge variety of alleged violations – a stress level that provides copyright-based enforcement a qualitatively totally different character from breach-of-contract claims.

What SearchGuard truly does

A good portion of the movement is dedicated to Google’s bot-detection system, which Google calls SearchGuard. The central technical argument is that SearchGuard is an internet site management measure, not a copyright entry management measure, and that the DMCA solely covers the latter.

Based on the submitting, SearchGuard “operates on the area stage. It doesn’t separate or segregate copyrighted content material from the reams of non-copyrighted public information it shows.” The system blocks automated entry to google.com throughout the board, no matter whether or not any specific search outcome incorporates licensed content material. It makes no distinction between queries that may return copyrighted thumbnails in a Data Panel and queries that may return solely hyperlinks to third-party web sites.

The movement calls SearchGuard “ephemeral.” As soon as a search outcome seems on a consumer’s display screen, the knowledge is not protected by any entry management in any respect – it may be freely copied, pasted, forwarded, or republished with out encountering any technological measure. The submitting illustrates this concretely utilizing Google’s personal criticism, which features a screenshot of a Data Panel for baseball participant Willie Mays. That Data Panel – together with a single licensed picture that Google highlighted for example of the copyrighted content material it was making an attempt to guard – was reproduced within the courtroom submitting having been obtained, based on SerpApi’s attorneys, “with out accessing google.com, encountering SearchGuard, violating Google’s Phrases of Use, and even being in privity with Google.”

The Sixth Circuit’s reasoning in Lexmark Worldwide, Inc. v. Static Management Parts, Inc. on the appellate stage offers the important thing precedent right here. Based on that ruling, “simply as one wouldn’t say {that a} lock on the again door of a home controls entry to a home whose entrance door doesn’t comprise a lock, … it doesn’t make sense to say that the … DMCA applies to in any other case readily-accessible copyrighted works.” The entrance door, SerpApi argues, is each authentic web site that Google scraped – all of which stay absolutely accessible with out encountering SearchGuard.

The movement additionally names the system pointedly: “The identify itself – ‘SearchGuard,’ not ‘CopyrightGuard’ – says all of it.” Google’s personal criticism, based on the submitting, acknowledges that SearchGuard’s function is to forestall automated entry as a result of Google doesn’t “generate promoting income when the queries are automated.” That admission, the movement argues, is deadly to the DMCA declare – the statute protects copyright pursuits, not promoting enterprise fashions.

The hypocrisy argument

What makes the case uncommon is that SerpApi’s protection leans closely on Google’s personal habits. The movement opens by describing Google as “the most important scraper on the planet,” noting that the corporate constructed its total enterprise by deploying bots to crawl publicly accessible pages throughout the web – copying content material, indexing it, and serving it again to customers with out asking permission and with out distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted materials.

Based on Khaleghy’s weblog publish, “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 courtroom claiming that our scraping is prohibited.”

The movement places the comparability this fashion: SerpApi “does to Google what Google does to everybody else. Identical to Google – however on a a lot smaller scale – SerpApi makes use of automated means to scrape public web sites and gather information, which it then makes accessible to its clients in methods it believes they may discover related and helpful.”

PPC Land has tracked this tension since Google filed its complaint, noting that Google scrapes billions of internet pages for AI coaching and search indexing whereas concurrently demanding authorized safety towards firms that scrape its personal search outcomes. The dynamic has specific resonance for publishers, who lack the authorized instruments to cease Google from extracting their content material for AI coaching however discover Google invoking those self same instruments to forestall others from accessing its search outcomes.

What circumvention truly means

The movement challenges Google’s characterization of SerpApi’s strategies as “circumvention” beneath the DMCA’s technical definition. The statute defines circumvention narrowly because the act of descrambling, decrypting, or in any other case avoiding, bypassing, eradicating, deactivating, or impairing a technological measure.

Based on the submitting, Google doesn’t allege any of these issues. What Google truly alleges is that SerpApi solved JavaScript challenges posed by SearchGuard, despatched requests by a number of IP addresses to remain inside price limits, and mimicked human-controlled browsers. The movement argues that fixing a problem is just not the identical as bypassing it. “Knocking on the door and being let in – even when one is sporting a masks – is just not the identical as drilling a gap within the wall and climbing by.”

The Ninth Circuit’s 2022 ruling in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. governs the evaluation right here, based on the movement. In that case, the appeals courtroom discovered that with respect to “web sites made freely accessible on the Web, the ‘breaking and coming into’ analogue invoked so regularly throughout congressional consideration has no utility, and the idea of with out authorization is inapt.” LinkedIn, like Google, operated a publicly accessible platform and sought to make use of authorized course of to forestall scraping. The Ninth Circuit declined to allow it.

The movement additionally addresses Google’s robots.txt argument particularly. Disregarding robots.txt directions – primarily a file that tells crawlers the place to not go – is described within the submitting as “no totally different than disregarding an indication to ‘keep off the grass.’ It’s not circumvention of a technological measure.” Courts in a number of jurisdictions have declined to deal with robots.txt because the equal of digital password safety.

A separate however equally necessary argument within the movement issues authorization. The DMCA solely protects entry controls applied “with the authority of the copyright proprietor.” Google doesn’t personal the copyrights to the content material in its search outcomes. It shows content material created by tens of hundreds of thousands of publishers, authors, and different creators who’ve by no means approved Google to limit others from accessing that content material.

Based on the submitting, “when Google scrapes LinkedIn, it does not talk with the publish’s creator. So, other than Google’s failure to allege that each search incorporates copyrighted materials, its failure to allege copyright proprietor authorization independently bars its declare.” The phrases “authority” and “copyright proprietor” don’t seem in Google’s criticism – a telling omission, the movement suggests, as a result of Google couldn’t plausibly allege such authorization.

Google’s narrower fallback declare – that some outcomes comprise content material it has licensed from third events – fares no higher beneath this evaluation. Google holds solely non-exclusive show rights to these pictures. Non-exclusive licensees can not authorize entry controls, and Google doesn’t allege that any of its licensors granted it the facility to limit how others entry the identical content material elsewhere.

The case sits on the intersection of search information entry, promoting market competitors, and the authorized infrastructure of the open internet – all matters with direct implications for entrepreneurs and their instruments. SerpApi’s buyer base contains builders, researchers, and companies whose merchandise rely upon programmatic entry to go looking information. A ruling in Google’s favor would considerably restrict that entry, concentrating management over search information in Google’s fingers.

SerpApi had already signaled its position in January 2026, when common counsel Chad Anson printed an in depth assertion arguing that Google’s SearchGuard constitutes a site visitors administration instrument fairly than a copyright safety system. “That regulation was written to guard encrypted DVDs and software program from piracy, to not let platforms block entry to publicly seen internet content material,” based on that assertion.

This broader context issues for anybody who makes use of third-party instruments to entry search information – web optimization platforms, aggressive intelligence instruments, advert monitoring companies, and AI coaching pipelines all depend on the precept that publicly seen data stays publicly accessible. A profitable DMCA declare by Google may make SearchGuard legally equal to DVD encryption, turning entry to go looking outcomes right into a protected act whatever the public nature of the knowledge displayed.

The Could 19, 2026 listening to will decide whether or not Decide Gonzalez Rogers permits the case to proceed or dismisses it at this early stage. Motions to dismiss beneath Rule 12(b)(6) ask the courtroom to find out whether or not the plaintiff has acknowledged a legally legitimate declare, even assuming all factual allegations are true. SerpApi is asking the courtroom to search out that Google has not – and can’t – state such a declare whatever the underlying info.

Timeline

Abstract

Who: SerpApi LLC, a 42-person firm primarily based in Austin, Texas offering search engine outcome APIs to builders, researchers, and companies; and Google LLC, the plaintiff and the world’s dominant search engine.

What: SerpApi immediately filed a 31-page movement to dismiss Google’s federal DMCA lawsuit (Case No. 25-cv-10826-YGR), arguing that Google lacks statutory standing as a non-copyright holder, that its SearchGuard bot-detection system is just not a copyright entry management measure, that SerpApi’s scraping strategies don’t represent “circumvention” beneath the DMCA’s technical definition, and that Google has not suffered a cognizable copyright damage.

When: The movement was filed on February 20, 2026. The underlying Google lawsuit was filed on December 19, 2025. A listening to on the movement to dismiss is scheduled for Could 19, 2026.

The place: United States District Courtroom for the Northern District of California, earlier than Decide Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Why: SerpApi argues that Google is making an attempt to weaponize a copyright statute designed to forestall DVD piracy and software program hacking in an effort to set up a authorized monopoly over publicly accessible search information, thereby defending its promoting income fairly than any respectable copyright curiosity. The case has broad implications for the open internet, since a ruling in Google’s favor may enable any platform displaying third-party content material to invoke the DMCA to dam automated entry, no matter whether or not the knowledge is publicly seen.


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