SerpApi Tries to Turn Google's Anti-Scraping DMCA Case With One Core Argument

Key Details

SerpApi's motion asks the court to dismiss Google's DMCA claims, including those under Section 1201(a), arguing that Google cannot sue over search results pages that display content owned by others.

• Google's December complaint alleged that SerpApi bypassed the company's SearchGuard anti-scraping system to access Google Search results at scale.
• According to the filing, SerpApi allegedly solved JavaScript challenges, rotated IP addresses, and mimicked human browser behavior to evade SearchGuard.
• SerpApi's motion asserts that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions protect copyright owners, not intermediaries like search engines that present licensed or user-supplied material.
• The motion highlights Google's own references to licensed images, merchant photos, and third-party Maps data on search results pages as examples of non-Google-owned content.
• SerpApi argues that under the DMCA, only the actual copyright holders can authorize or control access measures for their works.
• The filing relies on the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Lexmark International v. Static Control Components to argue that Google lacks statutory standing under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
• SerpApi states that Google is claiming injuries such as increased infrastructure costs and reduced advertising revenue tied to automated queries routed through SerpApi.
• According to the motion, those alleged harms fall outside the DMCA's zone of interests as described in Lexmark, which focuses on protecting rights holders and their copyrighted works.
• On circumvention, SerpApi wrote that it accesses publicly visible web pages without descrambling, decrypting, or disabling any access control system, and that viewing public search results is not circumvention.
• The motion characterizes SearchGuard as a bot-management and traffic-filtering tool rather than a DMCA-protected gate to copyrighted works.

Background Context

Google sued SerpApi under the DMCA after launching SearchGuard, a system designed to detect and block automated scraping of Search results. According to Google's complaint, SerpApi's product retrieves and redistributes Google Search data for paying customers.

Section 1201(a) of the DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works. It also restricts trafficking in tools designed to circumvent such protections.

SerpApi's filing cites the Supreme Court's Lexmark decision, which applied a "zone of interests" test to statutory standing. In December 2025, Judge Sidney Stein dismissed Ziff Davis's DMCA Section 1201(a) anti-circumvention claim against OpenAI that was based on robots.txt directives.

SerpApi has also moved to dismiss a separate Reddit lawsuit that named SerpApi alongside Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy as defendants over automated access to Reddit content.

The court has scheduled a hearing on SerpApi's motion to dismiss for May 19, 2026. Under the current schedule, Google must file its opposition brief before that date.

Source Citations

• Google's allegations against SerpApi are detailed in its federal complaint, available as a PDF from Google here.
• SerpApi summarizes its motion to dismiss and legal arguments in an official blog post here.
• The Ziff Davis v. OpenAI decision is published on Justia with the court's December 15, 2025 opinion here.
• Reddit's October lawsuit naming SerpApi, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy is available as a complaint PDF here.
• The statutory text for DMCA Section 1201 is published by the U.S. Copyright Office here.