Reddit's DMCA Win, Google's Loss: Scraping Law Just Split
The Reddit v. Perplexity DMCA lawsuit survived dismissal weeks after Google lost a near-identical case against the same scraper. The difference is who owns the content.
The Reddit v. Perplexity DMCA lawsuit just survived a motion to dismiss, and it happened days after Google lost a near-identical claim against one of the same defendants. Same statute. Overlapping facts. Opposite results.
If you scrape anything for a side project, a dataset, or an AI product, the split between those two rulings is the most useful thing to come out of a courtroom this year. I'm commenting here on Ars Technica's write-up, Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive.
🔍 The same scraper, two courts, two answers
SerpApi is a defendant in both cases. Google sued it in California for scraping search result pages. Reddit sued it in New York, alongside Perplexity AI, Oxylabs and AWMProxy, for allegedly harvesting Reddit content out of those same search result pages and reselling it.
Google's claims were thrown out. Reddit's were allowed to proceed. Here is the shape of it:
| Google v. SerpApi | Reddit v. Perplexity, SerpApi et al. | |
|---|---|---|
| Statute | DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention | DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention |
| What was scraped | Google search result pages | Reddit posts, surfaced via Google search results |
| Who owns the scraped text | Mostly nobody / third parties | Reddit, via its user agreement |
| Outcome | Dismissed, with a chance to amend | Survives dismissal, case continues |
Key takeaway: §1201 is not a general anti-scraping law. It only bites when there is a copyrighted work sitting behind the wall you climbed over. Google's problem was that URLs, snippets and aggregated index data are largely facts, and facts are not protected works.
That is the whole difference. Reddit can point at millions of posts it holds a licence to. Google, pointing at its own SERP, was pointing at a list of other people's things.
⚖️ §1201 punishes the lock-picking, not the copying
This part gets misread constantly, so it is worth being precise. There are two separate questions in any scraping fight:
- Did you copy a protected work? That is ordinary copyright, and fair use is a live defence.
- Did you defeat a technical measure that controls access to it? That is §1201, and fair use is a much weaker shield there.
The allegations in the Reddit case are about the second question. Reported conduct includes rotating IP addresses, masking identity, and routing through proxy networks to get around blocks. If you have ever written a scraper, you have probably written at least one of those.
A rate limiter, a bot-detection challenge, or a login wall can all count as an access control. The fact that a page is reachable without a password does not automatically make it unprotected.
Practical read for a builder: the legal risk of a scraper scales with how hard you worked to avoid being detected, not with how much data you pulled. A polite crawler that respects robots.txt, identifies itself in the User-Agent, and backs off on 429s is in a completely different position from a residential-proxy rotation setup, even if both end up with the same rows in the same database.
🌐 Why this reaches you from Sri Lanka
The easy assumption is that a US district court ruling is somebody else's problem. It usually isn't, because the dependencies of a modern side project are almost all American.
| Where you touch US jurisdiction | Typical exposure |
|---|---|
| Hosting on Vercel, AWS, Cloudflare, Netlify | Terms-of-service takedown, account termination |
| Payouts via Stripe, Payoneer, PayPal | Funds held, account review |
| Publishing to the App Store, Play Store, npm, PyPI | Listing removal on a rights complaint |
| Buying data from a proxy or scraping API vendor | You inherit their legal posture |
That last row is the one I would flag hardest. Reddit's complaint does not only target the AI company. It targets the data middlemen. Buying a cheap dataset does not launder its origin. If you pay for a scraped corpus and the vendor gets sued for how they collected it, "I bought it" is not a defence, it is a receipt.
For those of us building on a small budget, the temptation is real: a proxy API costs a few dollars and saves weeks of work. The cost that isn't on the pricing page is that you have no idea what was circumvented on your behalf.
💡 Your posts are somebody else's legal ammunition
Here is the uncomfortable second-order lesson. The reason Reddit has a case at all is that its user agreement gives it a licence to content that its users wrote for free.
Every answer you posted to help a stranger is now an asset on a balance sheet, and a line in a federal complaint. You wrote it. You cannot enforce anything about it. Reddit can.
That is not an argument to stop posting on forums. It is an argument to make sure the platform is not the only copy:
- Write the long, useful version on your own domain first, then syndicate.
- Keep the source of anything you would be annoyed to lose, in a repo you control.
- Treat a platform's export button as a thing you use quarterly, not a thing you assume exists.
If you are moving off scraping and onto a real API, the JSON you get back is a good place to start being disciplined about types. Our JSON to TypeScript converter turns a sample response into interfaces in one paste, which beats hand-writing them and getting a nullable field wrong at 2am.
🛠️ A sane checklist before you point a crawler at anything
Not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer. This is the engineering hygiene I apply to my own projects:
- Check for an official API first. Even a rate-limited free tier removes the entire §1201 question.
- Read the terms of service. Not the whole thing. Search it for "scrape", "crawl", "automated", "robot".
- Honour
robots.txt. It is weak legally and strong practically. Ignoring it is evidence of intent. - Identify yourself. A real User-Agent with a contact URL turns "attacker" into "developer we can email".
- Never defeat a challenge. Solving CAPTCHAs, rotating residential IPs, or forging session cookies is the exact conduct at issue in these cases.
- Log what you took and when. If a complaint arrives, provenance records are the difference between a conversation and a default judgment.
What this means for you
If your project reads other people's data, the ruling changes your risk model in one specific way: stop asking whether the page was public, and start asking who owns what is on it.
A scraper aimed at genuinely factual, aggregated data sits on ground Google just failed to fence off. A scraper aimed at user-generated writing sits on ground Reddit is currently defending, and winning early rounds on.
The Reddit case is still only past a motion to dismiss. Surviving dismissal means the allegations are legally coherent enough to argue, not that they are true or that Reddit wins. But the signal is already loud enough to design around, and designing around it costs you almost nothing right now. Rewriting your data pipeline after a complaint costs considerably more.