Reddit's DMCA case against a web scraper survives. Two weeks ago, a similar Google suit died.

Two federal judges in Manhattan, two parallel DMCA cases against the same web scraper, two opposite early outcomes. The difference between them turns on one slippery question: did Reddit ever authorize Google to use anti-scraping technology against everyone else?

On Friday, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer largely denied SerpApi's motion to dismiss in Reddit v. SerpApi (1:25-cv-08736), letting the case move into discovery. The ruling came less than two weeks after a different SDNY judge granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss in Google's near-identical DMCA suit. Same defendant, same statute, similar facts, opposite results at the pleading stage.

Web scraping is the practice of pulling content from a website without its official interface, copying Reddit posts, prices, or reviews into a database. SerpApi sells a product that scrapes Google's search results, including the snippets that surface Reddit comments, and resells that data. Reddit's first amended complaint, filed February 6, 2026, alleges that SerpApi built its scraper specifically to extract Reddit content from Google's results and that Perplexity AI, an AI search company, paid for access to that capability. The workaround, Reddit argues, was designed to bypass Google's anti-bot controls. In its March 13 motion to dismiss, SerpApi countered that what it was selling was a normal product built on publicly available search output.

The legal theory is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's §1201 anti-circumvention provision, a 1998 clause written to crack copy-protection on DVDs and software that has since become a popular tool against scrapers. To win, plaintiffs have to clear three prongs: (1) a conspiracy to access copyrighted works, (2) works protected by a technological measure that effectively controls access, and (3) defendants who circumvented that measure. Engelmayer's Friday opinion held that Reddit plausibly alleged all three at this stage. As one comparator explainer noted, the two cases diverge on which prong each side chose to lead with.

The split between the two cases lives almost entirely in prong one. Google failed to show that Reddit had ever authorized Google to use anti-circumvention technology to block scraping in the first place. Without that authorization, Google had no protected measure to defend, and its case collapsed. Engelmayer reached the opposite conclusion in Reddit's case, finding it plausible at the pleading stage that the two companies' 2024 data-licensing deal covered exactly that kind of technology.

Google's anti-scraping system was invented more than a year after Google and Reddit signed their data deal, which means the authorization Reddit allegedly granted in 2024 had to be read to cover technology that did not yet exist. Engelmayer accepted Reddit's reading; the Google judge did not. The disagreement is a fight over how much retroactive reach a single contract clause can have, and both sides are right that the answer will shape what flows through Google into AI products.

SerpApi's public position is that both companies are trying to "use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn't author and don't own." Google told Ars Technica it plans to amend its complaint to keep its case alive. None of the parties' positions are findings of fact; both rulings sit at the motion-to-dismiss stage, where courts ask only whether the complaint states a plausible claim.

The downstream stake is what the AI data pipe actually looks like. If a 2024 data deal can be read to cover technology invented a year later, then any search-engine licensing arrangement becomes a foothold for §1201 claims against whoever scrapes the result. If it cannot, then pulling Reddit snippets out of Google is a workaround that survives. The split between the two SDNY judges, on essentially the same record, is the first sign that the doctrine will not settle on its own. The next reference point is whichever case loses at summary judgment first.