NextFin News - SerpApi filed a renewed motion to dismiss Reddit’s amended lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on March 13, 2026, marking a pivotal escalation in the legal battle over who owns the data that fuels the artificial intelligence economy. The Austin-based scraping firm, represented by Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, is asking Judge Paul Adam Engelmayer to throw out the case with prejudice, arguing that Reddit is attempting to weaponize the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to protect content it does not actually own. The filing follows a February amendment by Reddit that sought to shore up its claims after an initial challenge, but SerpApi contends the platform’s legal theory remains fundamentally flawed.
The dispute centers on a massive data harvesting operation. According to subpoena data cited in the litigation, SerpApi alone accessed more than 1.8 billion Google search engine results pages (SERPs) containing Reddit data during a single two-week window in July 2025. Reddit’s core allegation is that SerpApi and other defendants, including Perplexity AI and Oxylabs, bypassed technological controls to scrape this content. However, SerpApi’s motion highlights a glaring contradiction in Reddit’s business model: the platform’s own user agreement states that Redditors, not the company, retain ownership of their posts. By holding only a non-exclusive license, SerpApi argues, Reddit lacks the statutory standing to sue for copyright circumvention under Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Reddit’s attempt to circumvent this "ownership gap" involved claiming copyright over minor technical snippets, such as date stamps and boilerplate policy notices that appeared in search results. SerpApi’s memorandum of law dismisses these as uncopyrightable "short phrases" and "factual addresses." The motion further argues that Google’s SearchGuard system—the very barrier SerpApi is accused of bypassing—does not qualify as an "effective" access control because it is designed to let human users through seamlessly. Under the Sixth Circuit’s Lexmark precedent, a lock that leaves the front door wide open cannot be used to trigger the severe penalties of federal anti-piracy law.
The financial stakes are transparently high. Reddit has increasingly moved to wall off its data behind lucrative licensing deals with giants like Google and OpenAI, viewing unauthorized scraping as a direct threat to its revenue. Yet SerpApi’s defense suggests that if Reddit’s theory is accepted, it would allow platforms to privatize the "public square" of the internet, exerting control over information posted by millions of users who never signed away their rights to the platform for the purpose of litigation. This case runs parallel to a similar suit filed by Google against SerpApi in California, creating a pincer movement of litigation that could redefine the legality of the entire web-scraping industry.
The outcome now rests on whether the court views the DMCA as a broad tool for platform gatekeeping or a narrow protection for copyright holders. If Judge Engelmayer grants the dismissal with prejudice, it would signal a major setback for Reddit’s strategy of using copyright law to enforce its data silos. For the broader AI and data-mining sectors, the ruling will determine whether the "public" web remains a harvestable resource or becomes a series of proprietary walled gardens. SerpApi’s motion makes it clear that the company views Reddit’s lawsuit not as a defense of creators, but as an attempt to enforce someone else’s rights over someone else’s technology.
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