Reddit Can Proceed With Scraping Claims Against Perplexity, SerpApi

Reddit can proceed with a lawsuit alleging that Perplexity and data scraper SerpApi wrongly obtained copyrighted Reddit posts from Google’s search results, a federal judge said
Friday.

The ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York, comes in a lawsuit filed by Reddit in October, when it claimed that SerpApi and artificial
intelligence company Perplexity violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, which prohibit bypassing technological restrictions on copying.

Reddit’s initial complaint included allegations that SerpApi used a workaround to bypass Google’s SearchGuard — an anti-scraping system that relies on CAPTCHAs — in order to provide
Perplexity with Reddit posts.

An amended complaint filed by Reddit in February includes allegations that Perplexity itself used tools provided by SerpApi to obtain Reddit
posts.

“Perplexity is doing more than simply receiving data from SerpApi,” Reddit alleged in that amended complaint. “Perplexity circumvents Google’s security protocols
and gains access, through unauthorized and automated processes, to Reddit data by using (at least) SerpApi’s tools or directing others to use those tools.”

Reddit also
alleged that content posted to its site includes posts by users as well as “tens of thousands of posts, comments, and other original works authored by Reddit itself.”

For
instance, one post allegedly scraped by SerpApi was an “Admin-authored 700-word…