I read Judge Paul Engelmayer’s July 31 order in Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi LLC this week, and Reddit’s own standing looks strange on paper. DMCA expert Meredith Rose of Public Knowledge told Ars Technica that a plaintiff needs to be the copyright owner, the exclusive licensee, or the party running the technological protection measure. “Reddit is none of those things,” Rose said: it doesn’t own the scraped posts, and Google, not Reddit, operates the CAPTCHA system SerpApi and Perplexity are accused of routing around. Engelmayer let the anti-circumvention claims proceed anyway.
That’s the new yardstick against the old one. Same scraper, same conduct, and a plaintiff with a far cleaner ownership claim than Reddit’s still lost outright on part of it.
This week wasn’t a clean win for Reddit either. Engelmayer tossed its Section 1201 trafficking claim against SerpApi, along with the unjust enrichment and unfair competition counts against both defendants, all preempted by the Copyright Act.
SerpApi isn’t retreating. Its lawyer, Jeff Homrig, told Ars Technica the company “accesses public search results, not Reddit’s platform,” and that public information doesn’t become protected because a platform wants to charge for it.
Discovery will test whether Reddit ever actually authorized Google to guard its content, the exact question SerpApi and Perplexity now get to litigate. If the answer is no, this theory falls apart fast. Worth watching before anyone else tries suing over content they don’t own.
Rebecca Lauren