A federal judge just handed Reddit an early win in its escalating war against AI scrapers. On Friday, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer refused to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit, finding the company plausibly alleged that SerpApi and Perplexity AI conspired to swipe copyrighted content from Google search results. It’s a significant ruling, especially because the same judge watched Google’s near-identical case against SerpApi collapse two weeks ago.
The difference comes down to a single, critical legal prong. To win, a plaintiff must first prove the scrapers conspired to access protected works. Google failed at that very first step, giving SerpApi a rare procedural victory. But Reddit cleared the bar. Engelmayer said it’s believable that Reddit authorized Google to use anti-circumvention tech to block malicious bots, even though that tech was built a full year after the two companies signed their $60 million data licensing deal. That temporal disconnect is going to be a messy fight.
SerpApi isn’t taking this lying down. A company spokesperson told Ars Technica that both Google and Reddit are abusing the DMCA to “wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.” That’s the core tension here. Reddit frames this as protecting its users’ posts and its business model. Scrapers frame it as a blatant land grab for public facts, with the DMCA twisted into a censorship tool.
Google, meanwhile, is scrambling to patch up its own complaint and get back in the ring. The search giant told Ars it plans to amend its filing, likely borrowing from the precise arguments that just worked for Reddit. For Perplexity, the AI search darling, this is another legal headache proving that its “answer engine” approach might be built on legally shaky ground. This isn’t just about two companies; it’s an accelerating battle to define who owns the public web.
