SerpApi Challenges Google’s Right To Sue Over SERP Scraping

SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss Google’s federal lawsuit, two months after Google sued the company below the DMCA for allegedly bypassing its SearchGuard anti-scraping system.

The submitting goes past disputing the technical allegations. SerpApi is difficult whether or not Google has the authorized proper to convey the case in any respect.

The Standing Query

SerpApi’s core argument is that the DMCA protects copyright homeowners, not firms that show others’ content material.

Google’s complaint cited licensed photographs in Information Panels, merchant-supplied photographs in Procuring outcomes, and third-party content material in Maps as examples of copyrighted materials SerpApi allegedly scraped.

SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy wrote that the content material in Google’s search outcomes belongs to publishers, authors, and creators, to not Google.

Khaleghy writes:

“Google is a web site operator. It isn’t the copyright holder of the data it surfaces.”

Khaleghy argued that solely a copyright holder can authorize entry controls below the DMCA. Google, he wrote, is attempting to say these rights with out the information or consent of the creators whose work is at subject.

Within the 31-page movement, SerpApi invokes the Supreme Court docket’s 2014 ruling in Lexmark Worldwide, Inc. v. Static Management Elements, Inc., which established {that a} plaintiff should present accidents inside the “zone of pursuits” the legislation was designed to guard. SerpApi argues Google’s alleged accidents, together with infrastructure prices and misplaced advert income from automated queries, don’t fall inside what the DMCA was constructed to handle.

The Circumvention Query

SerpApi additionally disputes whether or not bypassing SearchGuard counts as circumvention below the DMCA.

Google alleged in December that SerpApi solved JavaScript challenges, used rotating IP addresses, and mimicked human browser habits to get previous SearchGuard.

Khaleghy wrote that the DMCA defines “to avoid a technological measure,” partly, as “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,” and argued SerpApi does none of these issues.

Khaleghy writes:

“We entry publicly seen net pages, the identical ones accessible to any browser. We don’t break encryption. We don’t disable authentication programs.”

The movement states Google “doesn’t allege unscrambling or decryption of any work, or the impairment, deactivation, or removing of any entry system.” SerpApi calls SearchGuard a bot-management device, not a copyright entry management.

Why This Issues

The end result might attain past SerpApi. Google’s DMCA idea, if accepted, would let any platform displaying licensed third-party content material use the statute to dam automated entry to publicly seen pages.

Once we covered Google’s original filing in December, I famous the central query was whether or not SearchGuard qualifies as a DMCA-protected entry management. SerpApi’s movement now provides a layer beneath that. Even when SearchGuard qualifies, SerpApi argues Google isn’t the proper social gathering to implement it.

In a separate case selected December 15, 2025, U.S. District Choose Sidney Stein dismissed Ziff Davis’s DMCA Part 1201(a) anti-circumvention declare tied to robots.txt towards OpenAI, holding Ziff Davis didn’t plausibly allege that robots.txt is a technological measure that successfully controls entry, or that OpenAI circumvented it.

Google’s SearchGuard is extra technically complicated than a robots.txt directive, however each circumstances check whether or not the DMCA can be utilized to limit automated entry to publicly obtainable content material.

Trying Forward

The listening to on SerpApi’s movement is scheduled for Could 19, 2026. Google will file its opposition earlier than then.

SerpApi additionally filed a movement to dismiss in a separate lawsuit introduced by Reddit in October, which named SerpApi alongside Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy. Each circumstances increase questions on utilizing DMCA anti-circumvention claims to problem bot evasion and automatic entry to pages which are viewable in a traditional browser.

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