Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive

Reddit's lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity AI has cleared its first judicial hurdle. A federal judge in New York ruled that Reddit has plausibly alleged a conspiracy in which a scraper sold a product designed to bypass Google's access controls, and an AI search engine paid for the privilege. The decision keeps the case alive at a moment when the legal ground beneath AI data harvesting is shifting in real time.

The interesting wrinkle is what happened two weeks earlier. A separate court dismissed Google's parallel action, finding that Reddit had never authorized Google to block scraping of its content in the first place. Google says it will amend its complaint. SerpApi, for its part, argues that both Google and Reddit are attempting to weaponize the DMCA to retroactively claim ownership over material neither company authored.

That framing matters. The DMCA was written to protect creators from unauthorized reproduction, not to give platforms veto power over how their hosted content circulates once it has been exposed to a search index. If courts ultimately accept Reddit's theory, the practical effect is that any site which publishes user-generated content can treat its appearance in search results as a controlled distribution channel, and sue anyone who re-extracts that content through intermediaries.

The labor market angle here is indirect but real. Reddit's corpus is one of the largest repositories of authentic human conversation on the open internet, and it has become a preferred training source precisely because it resists the sanitization that professional content undergoes. A ruling that lets Reddit monetize or restrict that pipeline reshapes the cost structure for every AI company building search-adjacent products. Perplexity's bet, and SerpApi's, is that the courts will treat scraped search snippets as fair game. Reddit's bet is that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions can be stretched to cover exactly that behavior. The judge has now said Reddit's version of events is at least plausible enough to proceed.