Reddit's DMCA Scraping Case Advances Against Perplexity, SerpApi

A ruling out of the Southern District of New York just made life meaningfully harder for AI answer engines that lean on scraped web data. According to Ars Technica, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer declined to dismiss Reddit's Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against Perplexity AI and the web scraping platform SerpApi, letting the core anti-circumvention theory move forward.

The interesting part is what the judge accepted. Reddit's claim leans on Google's SearchGuard, an anti-scraping system that relies on CAPTCHAs, which SerpApi is alleged to have used a workaround to bypass in order to hand Reddit posts to Perplexity. Engelmayer found that SearchGuard qualifies as a measure that controls access to online work, as required to sustain a DMCA 1201(a) claim, and that Reddit's injuries sit "within the zone of interests" of the law. He wrote that Reddit "epitomizes the 'global digital on-line marketplace for copyrighted works' that the DMCA sought to promote," per MLex's coverage. That is a broader read of Section 1201 than a lot of the AI industry was counting on.

The context that makes this weird is what happened in a sibling case. When Google itself brought DMCA claims against SerpApi over the same SearchGuard bypass, a judge tossed those claims, finding SearchGuard guards ad revenue rather than copyright. Engelmayer took the opposite path for Reddit, whose content is undisputedly copyrighted user work. That split is exactly the kind of doctrinal fork appellate courts eventually have to resolve, and either way the answer will shape whether scraping a platform through an intermediary is a copyright problem or a terms-of-service problem.

The honest caveats matter. This is a motion-to-dismiss ruling, not a merits verdict, and the judge did trim the case, dismissing a 1201(b) trafficking claim against SerpApi and knocking out the unfair competition and unjust enrichment counts against both defendants. What the reporting does not give you is any read on how Perplexity's actual ingestion pipeline works in practice, whether Reddit has parallel suits queued up against other AI shops, or how this interacts with Reddit's existing paid data licensing deals.

For anyone building on scraped web data, the strategic signal is worth taking seriously now rather than after discovery starts. If a third party's anti-bot system can be an access control for someone else's copyrighted content, the surface area for DMCA exposure across the AI stack just widened. The likely winners in that world are the platforms that own high-value user content and the licensed data vendors who can sell the same material without the legal tail.