Reddit's copyright protection against AI scraping cleared in court

A federal court largely rejected a motion to dismiss from SerpApi, a web scraping tool accused of conspiracy with Perplexity AI to illegally extract Reddit's copyrighted content through Google search results. Judge Paul A. Engelmayer found the conspiracy allegations plausible at this stage, with SerpApi providing technology to circumvent Google's access controls while Perplexity AI funded the operation. The decision follows the dismissal of a similar lawsuit brought by Google, where the court determined Google had not proven authorization from content holders like Reddit to block extraction. Google indicated plans to revise its complaint and pursue the case further, while SerpApi contends that both companies are misusing DMCA provisions to lock down the open internet by retroactively claiming ownership of content they neither authored nor own.