Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive
AI scraping battle heats up Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive Reddit advances lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of conspiring with web scraper. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it. Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent the scraping of protected content.
- ▪AI scraping battle heats up Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive Reddit advances lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of conspiring with web scraper.
- ▪Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.
- ▪Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent th
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| Original publisher | Ars Technica |
| Canonical URL | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/reddit-keeps-weird-dmca-lawsuit-against-web-scraper-alive-despite-googles-loss/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:19:39 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T23:18:35.013Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T23:18:35.013Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | FDa96VrJblWg · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI scraping battle heats up Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive Reddit advances lawsuit accusing Perplexity AI of conspiring with web scraper. Ashley Belanger – Jul 31, 2026 5:19 pm | 4 Credit: picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance Credit: picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ars Technica.
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