Judge Allows Reddit to Proceed with Lawsuit Against Data Scrapers

A federal judge in New York has ruled that Reddit can proceed with its lawsuit against Perplexity and data scraper SerpApi. The lawsuit alleges that both companies violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions by obtaining copyrighted Reddit posts from Google's search results.

Reddit initially filed a complaint in October, claiming that SerpApi used a workaround to bypass Google's SearchGuard system, which relies on CAPTCHAs. The amended complaint filed in February includes allegations that Perplexity itself used tools provided by SerpApi to obtain Reddit posts.

Perplexity and SerpApi sought an early dismissal of the lawsuit, but U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected their arguments. He ruled that if Reddit's allegations were proven true, they could support a conclusion that both companies violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The ruling comes less than two weeks after a different federal judge dismissed a complaint by Google against SerpApi over alleged scraping of search results.