“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win

The courtroom has become the preferred venue for settling arguments that copyright law was never designed to referee. Google and Reddit, having lost a round against the scraping outfit SerpApi, are signaling they intend to keep litigating the principle that search results are property worth fencing off from AI bots. The weapon of choice is the DMCA, a statute written to stop the ripping of DVDs, now redeployed to police the boundary between a search engine and the models that want to read it.

The legal theory is straightforward enough on its face. Google argues that its anti-scraping measures exist to protect copyrighted snippets displayed in search results, particularly the licensed material that populates knowledge panels. SerpApi, by circumventing those measures and reselling the output, allegedly undermines contractual arrangements with rights holders. It is a tidy narrative: gatekeeper, gatekept content, gatekeeper's permission.

What the narrative omits is the actual asymmetry of leverage. Google does not need the DMCA to block scrapers. Its robots.txt files, rate limits, and infrastructure-level controls already do that work. The DMCA invocation is not about technical protection; it is about establishing a legal precedent that scraping search results constitutes circumvention of a technological measure, even when the scraped data is largely factual and freely visible to any human visitor. A win on that point would extend a copyright-style moat around a product that copyright was never meant to cover.

Reddit's participation in the suit is the more telling move. The platform has spent the last two years repositioning itself as a licensor of conversational data, striking deals with Google and others to monetize the archive of human conversation it hosts. Joining Google's fight is less about solidarity than alignment: both companies are attempting to convert the legal infrastructure of content ownership into a toll booth for the AI economy. The DMCA is merely the most convenient tool currently within reach.

SerpApi's victory, narrow as it may be, exposes the fragility of that strategy. Courts are not obligated to treat search results as copyrighted compilations merely because a platform says they are. And the broader AI industry is watching closely, because the answer to whether scraping public-facing search output constitutes DMCA circumvention will shape who gets to build the next generation of information tools, and on whose terms.