The lawsuit against SerpApi by Google has been going through a phase of legal difficulties as one of Google's main arguments under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been rejected by a U. S. federal court. The court found that scraping public information from Google Search results is not protected under copyright and can't be classified under the law as acts of copyright circumvention.
Google sued SerpApi in December, accusing the company of bypassing its SearchGuard anti-scraping system to collect and sell Google Search results. SerpApi responded by asking the court to dismiss the DMCA claims, and the judge agreed.
Judge Draws a Line Between Public Data and Copyrighted Content
The court said the DMCA protects technologies that restrict access to copyrighted works, not publicly available information. Since most Google Search results consist of public data, the judge found that SearchGuard cannot be used as the basis for a copyright claim in those cases. These claims have been dismissed permanently.
The ruling was different for search results that include licensed images, such as those shown in Google Knowledge Panels. The judge said Google did not provide enough evidence to show it had the copyright owners' permission to use SearchGuard to protect those images. Because of that, this part of the case was also dismissed, but Google has been allowed to file an updated complaint.
The judge also dismissed SerpApi's argument that Google had no legal standing to bring a DMCA case, saying the law does not limit such claims only to copyright owners.
Google now has 21 days to amend its complaint if it wants to continue pursuing the copyright-related claims. Until then, the court has paused the discovery process.
The decision does not end the lawsuit, but it does narrow Google's use of the DMCA in cases involving the scraping of public search results. It also makes a clear distinction between accessing publicly available information and content that is protected by copyright.
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