Overview
- SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss on Feb. 20–21, challenging Google’s December 2025 suit in California federal court over large-scale scraping of Search results.
- Google alleges SerpApi bypassed its SearchGuard protections, misled systems with automated queries, and resells content Google licenses, violating DMCA §1201.
- SerpApi contends it only accessed publicly visible pages without decryption or disabling authentication and argues that mimicking a human browser or solving CAPTCHAs is not circumvention.
- The company argues Google holds no copyright in aggregated search results and cites hiQ v. LinkedIn and Lexmark to claim the DMCA does not cover scraping public data.
- An EFF attorney underscored the importance of scraping public information for an open internet, and a recent federal ruling by Judge Sidney Stein declined to treat robots.txt violations as DMCA circumvention.