• by Wendy Davis , 5 hours ago

Renewing its battle with SerpApi, Google this week filed an amended complaint alleging that the Texas-based company -- which provides data to other businesses -- bypassed attempts to prevent it from scraping search results.

The move comes three weeks after U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California dismissed Google's original complaint, ruling that the company could not pursue its claims for much of the material that appears on the search results pages.

Rogers specifically said Google could only proceed with claims over material that it licensed from third parties, and suggested that Google also would have to show that the content's owner authorized Google to use technological measures aimed at preventing scraping.

Google's amended complaint includes some new allegations regarding licensed content.

For instance, Google alleges that Reddit -- which licenses content to Google -- directed Google "not to enable third parties to extract and independently commercialize the licensed content."

Google adds in the amended complaint that its "licensing partners" have "expressly requested that Google prevent unauthorized access to licensed content."

The revised allegations come in a battle that began last year, when Google alleged that SerpApi violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, which prohibit bypassing technological restrictions on copying.

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

Google added that it launched "SearchGuard" last year in order to prevent scraping by bots, but that SerpApi used a workaround to bypass SearchGuard.

SerpApi counsel stated Tuesday, "We remain confident in the strength of SerpApi's position and look forward to responding."

Google isn't the only one suing SerpApi. The company also faces claims by Reddit, which alleges that SerpApi and others wrongly obtained copyrighted Reddit posts from Google's search results.

Late last month, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York ruled that Reddit could proceed with its claims.