On July 31, 2026, federal judge Paul Engelmayer (Southern District of New York) refused to dismiss Reddit's lawsuit against Perplexity AI and the search results aggregator SerpApi. The key claims under the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA § 1201(a) have survived — the case will proceed. Eleven days prior, another federal judge in Northern California dismissed a nearly identical lawsuit from Google against the same SerpApi. The same technical barrier, the same defendant — and two opposing outcomes.
This is not a contradiction between courts. It is a clear signal of where the legal boundary in scraping lies in 2026. And it is not where engineers are accustomed to looking for it.
What the Court Decided on July 31
The case Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi LLC et al. (No. 1:25-cv-08736) was filed by Reddit on October 22, 2025, and expanded its complaint in February 2026. There are four defendants, and their composition is important: the AI company Perplexity AI, the results aggregator SerpApi, and two proxy providers — Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy.
The logic of the accusation is as follows: intermediaries were extracting Reddit content on an industrial scale not from Reddit's own servers, but from Google search results, disguising its origin to bypass protections; Perplexity purchased this data and fed it into its AI engine.
Judge Engelmayer separated the claims:
- Survived: the main claim under DMCA § 1201(a) — circumvention of a technical measure of access control. The court recognized that Google's SearchGuard qualifies as an access control measure under the law, and Reddit is "within the zone of interests" of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. In the judge's words, the platform "embodies the very global digital market of protected works" for which the DMCA was enacted.
- Dropped: the claim of "trafficking" under § 1201(b) against SerpApi, as well as claims of unfair competition and unjust enrichment against both defendants.
An important caveat: this ruling is on a motion to dismiss the complaint, not a verdict on the merits. The court merely stated that the case has the right to proceed to trial. However, it is at this stage that weak claims against scrapers typically die — this one did not.
Why Google Lost and Reddit Passed the Filter
On July 20, 2026, presiding judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California dismissed Google's DMCA lawsuit against SerpApi — without the right to refile in its previous form. We analyzed this ruling in detail: the court agreed that browser fingerprint spoofing, IP rotation, and CAPTCHA solving are technically circumvention, but circumvention itself is not illegal if there are no copyrighted works behind the barrier.
Google stumbled on this point. The company did not claim that its search results are protected by copyright law and did not demonstrate that it implemented SearchGuard "with the permission of the copyright owner," as required by 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(3)(B). The barrier protected advertising revenue — and the DMCA protects copyright, not revenue.
Reddit approached from a different angle. According to Reddit, behind the same SearchGuard are not "flat irrelevant results," but user posts — texts from real people, the rights to which Reddit licenses, including through financial deals with Google and OpenAI. The difference is not in the circumvention technique. The difference is in what exactly lies behind the barrier.
The takeaway for engineers and data owners: the technical identity of actions does not imply the legal identity of consequences. The same script with residential IP rotation in one case is lawful handling of public facts, while in another, it is circumvention of protection for a copyrighted work.
Where Proxies Fit into This Case
For our industry, the most interesting aspect of the case is not Perplexity, but the other two names on the list of defendants. Oxylabs and AWMProxy are not included as witnesses or as "third-party tools," but as co-defendants: the plaintiff believes that the anonymization infrastructure was part of the circumvention scheme.
The court has suspended Oxylabs' motion to dismiss the complaint — due to substantial overlap of its arguments with those of SerpApi and Perplexity, the briefing has been frozen until the defendants' motions are resolved. These motions have now been resolved, and the basic anti-circumvention theory has survived. This means that the proxy provider's turn has come, and it approaches this situation in a significantly worse negotiating position than six months ago.
Two more details from the case materials that say a lot about the scale and methods of proof:
- According to data obtained through a court request, SerpApi accessed approximately 1.8 billion pages of Google search results containing Reddit data over two weeks in July 2025.
- Reddit employed a classic trap: it placed content visible only to Google's crawler, then discovered it in Perplexity's responses. This is the type of evidence that transforms the abstract "they are getting data from somewhere" into a concrete supply chain.
The "poisoned bait" tactic is worth remembering for another reason. It shows that major platforms have long moved from blocking to gathering evidence: marked content, honeypot pages, unique snippets. Your caution at the network level won't save you if the content itself is marked.
Weaknesses of the Complaint That Are Rarely Discussed
Reddit passed the first filter, but its position is far from flawless, and the defense strikes at two pressure points.
The first — who actually owns the posts. Reddit's user agreement retains rights to publications with the authors, while the platform receives a non-exclusive license. SerpApi insists that this gap is "fatal to every point" of the complaint: you cannot protect by copyright what you do not own. The same argument against Google did not work at all — there, the dispute was over its own results.
The second — the copyrightability of specific examples. In the expanded complaint, Reddit provided samples of material it considers its own: a fragment of a privacy policy, a list of movies, the date and address of a jazz club. The defense reasonably responds that lists, facts, and short fragments do not meet the threshold for protection. Additionally, a separate argument: SearchGuard is not an "effective measure of access control," as a person can pass through it seamlessly — one access route remains open at all times.
These arguments have not disappeared — they are simply postponed until the merits stage. So, saying "Reddit won" is a strong simplification. It is more accurate to say: the anti-circumvention theory against scrapers and data buyers has the right to exist in the New York court. In the U.S., a decision from one district does not bind another, and we are witnessing a split in practice in real-time.
What This Means Practically
If you are collecting data for business purposes, there are some very practical takeaways from the July 31 decision.
- Evaluate not the barrier, but the content behind it. Circumventing CAPTCHA on a page with pricing, schedules, or addresses is one risk story. Circumventing the same barrier for texts, photos, and reviews, the rights to which belong to someone, is fundamentally different. Legal exposure is determined by the object, not the tool.
- The data buyer is no longer safe. Perplexity built its defense on the claim that it is merely an end purchaser and "summarizes public discussions." The court did not find this argument sufficient to dismiss the case. This is a direct signal to all who purchase ready-made datasets: you will need to explain the origin of the data.
- Contracts and ToS exist separately from the DMCA. Even where copyright theory collapses, violations of terms of service remain a standalone basis. A platform's loss under the DMCA does not mean that scraping is "approved by the court."
- The infrastructure layer has become visible to plaintiffs. When proxy providers are among the defendants, the question "what does my provider know and log about my traffic" ceases to be paranoid. Choose a provider with clear sources for its pool, a coherent acceptable use policy, and KYC — this is precisely the boring paperwork that distinguishes an infrastructure partner from a participant in someone else's scheme. We discussed the criteria in our analysis of legal data collection practices through proxies.
- Separate tasks by level of risk. Price monitoring, checking search results, controlling the availability of your own resources, and geo-testing are typical scenarios with predictable legal profiles; for them, residential proxies or cheap datacenter addresses are suitable if the platform does not require "residential" origin. Mass extraction of someone else's copyrighted content for training models is a scenario that is now moving into courtrooms, and it needs to be addressed with licensing, not IP rotation.
In Brief
Two federal courts reached different conclusions about the same circumvention of the same barrier within eleven days. California: circumventing search protection without copyright behind it is not a DMCA violation. New York: if protected user content lies behind the barrier, the anti-circumvention claim has the right to be considered, along with claims against intermediaries and data buyers.
For those who work with data professionally, the takeaway is clear: the technical side of collection is no longer the main risk factor. The primary concern is about the rights to what you are taking and the transparency of the chain through which this data came to you. The next milestone in the case is Oxylabs' motion, which the court has unthawed following the resolution of the co-defendants' motions.