Judge Rejects Google's DMCA Attempt to Stop Web Scraping
Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
A judge dismissed Google's lawsuit against SerpAPI, ruling that the company cannot use the DMCA to block scraping of its search results. The court found that Google's SearchGuard measure does not effectively protect copyrighted works, as search results often contain no copyrightable content. This decision challenges the trend of using anti-circumvention laws to restrict access to the open web for AI and data companies.
To the extent that Google Search results do not contain any copyrighted content, SearchGuard cannot be said to effectively control access to a work protected under the Copyright Act.
- binarymax
I'd be more OK with this if Google had a good API for their search results. But they've deprecated it, and now there is no alternative. So I'll continue to use 3rd parties that scrape Google results, until they change their mind.
- SoftTalker
> The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.”
Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them).
Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.
- akrymski
EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression.
In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data.
I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.
- jonatron
It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957
- 1saadcodes
The irony is that Google's success was built on crawling and indexing the open web. I understand wanting to protect your product, but once you remove affordable APIs and then object to third parties filling that gap, you're creating demand for the very behavior you're trying to discourage
- 1vuio0pswjnm7
Missing from this blog post is that the suit was filed because OpenAI was using SerpApi to collect Google search results
Alphabet is an Anthropic investor
Looking forward to the Amended Complaint by August 10
https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-46767...
- thisislife2
I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?
- dmix
DMCA needs to be reformed one day.