On Friday, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer largely denied a motion to dismiss from SerpApi, accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape Reddit content from Google search results.

The judge said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.

Google had previously failed in a similar action against Reddit, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent scraping. However, Engelmayer’s decision may strengthen Google's arguments that it can use anti-circumvention technology to block malicious scraping.

Both Google and Reddit aim to prove that SerpApi and Perplexity AI conspired to access content protected by a technological measure effectively controlling access, and that the defendants circumvented that technology.

This case highlights the ongoing tension between tech giants, web scrapers and copyright laws in an increasingly digital world.