Google's DMCA Lawsuit Against SerpApi Dismissed; Judge Rules Search Results Not Copyrighted

Summary

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has dismissed Google's lawsuit against SerpApi, the web scraping API service, ruling that Google cannot use copyright law to prevent the scraping of search results. Google had sued SerpApi under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging the company bypassed its anti-bot barrier "SearchGuard." However, the judge found that plain search results—URLs, snippets, and factual index data—are publicly accessible facts that do not qualify as protected copyrighted works under the Copyright Act.

While the judge acknowledged that SerpApi's circumvention techniques (spoofing browser fingerprints, rotating IPs, solving CAPTCHAs) do technically constitute "circumvention" under the DMCA, the court ruled that circumvention is only illegal if it protects copyrighted works with the permission of copyright owners. Since search results themselves are uncopyrighted facts, Google's claims were dismissed without leave to amend.

For claims regarding knowledge panels and third-party content displayed in Google's search results, the judge dismissed those with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint. The judge ruled that Google would need to demonstrate authorization from the actual copyright holders to enforce access controls on their behalf—a requirement Google failed to meet in its original complaint. The decision represents a significant legal victory for web scraping services and establishes that copyright law cannot be used to restrict access to publicly available factual information.

• Ruling establishes that companies cannot use copyright law as a tool to prevent scraping of publicly available information