Judge tosses Google's DMCA suit against scraper SerpApi

A federal judge just told Google that public search results are not copyrighted material, and Google is going to try again anyway. On July 20, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's Digital Millennium Copyright Act suit against SerpApi, a company that scrapes Google search results and resells them as structured data, Ars Technica reported. The reasoning was narrow but consequential: the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules only cover technology guarding actual copyrighted works, and the URLs, snippets, and factual index data on a results page are, in the judge's framing, public facts.

That matters because Google's theory would have turned SearchGuard, its anti-bot defense, into a de facto copyright layer over any content Google chose to index. The court did not buy it. SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy said the company was "pleased that the court rejected Google's attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages," and noted that Google's damages calculation, "applied literally, would top the entire US economy." Meredith Rose of the advocacy group Public Knowledge summed the ruling up more plainly, telling reporters that "Google didn't allege enough about what it was protecting that was copyrighted."

Google is not giving up. The company has 21 days to file an amended complaint, and it plans to narrow the theory to Knowledge Panels, the summary boxes Google says contain explicitly licensed media from rights holders. That is a real legal path, but it has an awkward side effect. Arguing that Knowledge Panel content is copyrighted enough to trigger DMCA protection also invites the same rights holders to point the argument back at Google's own use of content elsewhere in its results.

The parallel case worth watching is Reddit's. In October 2025, Reddit sued SerpApi on similar grounds, alleging it supplied user comments to Perplexity for AI training. SerpApi has moved to dismiss on the same reasoning that just worked against Google, arguing Reddit does not hold copyright on the bulk of what its users post.

The honest caveat is that this is one district-court ruling, not a settled doctrine, and Google's Knowledge Panels amendment could still shrink SerpApi's win. What the reporting does not give you is which specific licensed items Google will point to, or how the Reddit judge will read a parallel outcome. But if the reasoning holds, the practical shift is that platforms betting on DMCA to wall off scraped data now need actual copyrighted material behind that wall, not just terms of service. For AI teams training on public web data, and for the smaller data brokers who feed them, that is firmer ground than any of the recent bot-blocking arms race.