Google and Reddit have been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to sue web scraping company SerpApi, arguing it illegally circumvents their anti-scraping technology to sell access to search results data. However, a court recently dismissed most of Google's lawsuit, finding Google lacked standing since it doesn't own the content in its search results, and Reddit's similar case faces the same legal obstacle. Legal experts warn that while the lawsuits aim to curb AI scraping, this broader push to restrict public web access could harm not just AI companies but also researchers, journalists, and archivists who depend on open data access.
