• by Wendy Davis , 4 hours ago

The Texas-based data scraper SerpApi is urging a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit by Google, which claims SerpApi circumvents attempts to prevent it from scraping search results.

In papers filed Friday with U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, SerpApi argues that Google's lawsuit marks an illegitimate attempt to "weaponize" the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

That law has anti-circumvention provisions that make it a crime to bypass technological restrictions on copying.

SerpApi argues that the copyright law's anti-circumvention section aims to prevent people from hacking "encrypted software and scrambled DVDs," and doesn't apply when companies like itself scrape public-facing websites like Google's search results pages.

"Google’s suit is forbidden by the statute’s plain text," SerpApi argues.

SerpApi's papers come in response to a lawsuit brought by Google late last year, when it accused SerpApi of having a "parasitic" business model that appropriates other services' content. Google isn't the only one suing SerpApi. Reddit also recently sued the company -- along with artificial intelligence company Perplexity -- for allegedly scraping content.

SerpApi contends in its bid for a fast dismissal that Google itself is a scraper, writing that the company developed its search engine "by using swarms of bots to scrape the public internet."

"When Google scrapes, it does not circumvent. Neither does SerpApi," it writes.

Google estimated in its complaint that it receives "hundreds of millions of artificial search requests each day" from SerpApi.

Google also said that in January 2025 it launched "SearchGuard" in order to prevent scraping by bots, but that SerpApi developed a workaround.

As described in Google's complaint, SearchGuard sends a JavaScript “challenge” to search queries from unrecognized sources; that challenge "calls upon the user’s browser to send Google a 'solve.'"

Google alleged that SerpApi used "fakery" to get around SafeGuard -- and bragged about its success in doing so.

For instance, according to Google, SafeGuard "uses automated means to bypass CAPTCHAs."

"SerpApi routinely boasts of its circumvention of SearchGuard," Google alleged in its complaint, which referenced a January 17, 2025 blog post by SerpApi that outlined its countermove to SearchGuard.

SerpApi argues in its bid for a fast dismissal that the allegations regarding fakery, even if proven true, wouldn't show that it circumvented technological restrictions on copying.

"Google does not allege unscrambling or decryption of any work, or the impairment, deactivation, or removal of any access system," SerpApi argues. "It only alleges that SerpApi 'solved' JavaScript challenges or CAPTCHAs or otherwise mimicked a human-controlled browser in ways that 'misled' Google into providing search results. But that is not the equivalent of breaking a lock or drilling through a wall to obtain a copy of a book."

SerpApi also says Google lacks "standing" to sue under the copyright law's anti-circumvention provisions, arguing that Google doesn't own a copyright interest in the material on the search results pages.

"Nothing in the Act suggests that a technology provider -- like Google -- that organizes public information and who has no copyright interest of its own falls within the Act’s 'zone of interests,'” SerpApi argues.

Google alleged in its complaint that it actually does license some copyrighted content it displays -- including high-resolution images for its Knowledge Panels.

But SerpApi counters that Google can't "manufacture standing just because it sometimes commingles a licensed thumbnail image alongside its search results."

"Throwing a protected pebble on a beach does not allow Google to claim dominion over shore and sea," SerpApi argues.

Rogers is expected to hold a hearing in the matter in May.