By Hannah Collymore
Publication Date: 2026-07-31 23:04:00
A federal judge in New York has refused to throw out the core of Reddit’s copyright case against Perplexity AI.
The fight is over how AI search engines harvest user posts and the ruling will set a precedent on whether anti-circumvention law can be used against companies that scrape content to feed AI answers.
What is Reddit accusing Perplexity and SerpAPI of?
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Englemeyer declined to dismiss Reddit’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against Perplexity and the web-scraping platform, SerpAPI. The act makes it illegal to bypass technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, which Reddit claims Perplexity and SerpAPI did using tricks like constantly changing their IP addresses to get around its and Google’s protections in order to grab user posts on a massive scale.
Judge Engelmayer said Reddit’s platform is exactly the kind of “global digital online marketplace for copyrighted works” that the DMCA was designed to protect. He also agreed, for now, that Google’s SearchGuard can count as a “technological measure” that controls access to protected work.
However, the judge dismissed a “trafficking” claim against SerpAPI, along with Reddit’s state-law claims for unfair competition and unjust enrichment against both defendants.
The case will now move into discovery, where Reddit’s claims will be tested against the actual evidence of how Perplexity and SerpAPI collected the posts.
