Google just took a swing at AI scrapers using a dusty old copyright law—and missed. A federal court rejected the search giant’s novel legal theory last week, but Google confirmed it’s not backing down. The target is SerpApi, a service that scrapes Google results and sells access through an API. Google’s weapon of choice? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law designed for Napster-era piracy, not bot warfare.
It’s a weird fit. Google search results are facts, not creative works, so they can’t be copyrighted. But Google argued that by bypassing its anti-scraping tech, SerpApi was circumventing protections for copyrighted content in knowledge panels and licensed snippets. The company said it filed the suit as a “last resort” to stop “malicious scraping” that violates rights holders’ choices. Reddit filed a nearly identical suit in October against SerpApi and Perplexity, claiming scrapers were evading two layers of security: Reddit’s own blocks and Google’s.
Meredith Rose from Public Knowledge didn’t mince words. She told Ars Technica the legal maneuvering is “bizarre” and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case.” But she wasn’t surprised. The DMCA has a long history of being stretched to quickly shut down disfavored uses and force licensing talks. Google, facing billions of bot queries it can’t monetize, seems to be “grasping at whatever tool is available.”
The court wasn’t buying it this round, but Google’s refusal to quit signals something bigger. This is a proxy war over who gets to index the open web. If scraping Google is a DMCA violation, the entire search ecosystem—and the AI models trained on it—faces a legal earthquake. The question isn’t just about SerpApi. It’s whether the web’s largest index can wall itself off, and whether a law written for DVDs can build that wall.
