Court Tosses Google's DMCA Claim Against Search Scraper SerpAPI

A federal judge dismissed Google’s DMCA Section 1201 lawsuit against SerpAPI, a service that scrapes Google Search results and repackages them as an unofficial API. Google argued that SerpAPI illegally circumvented “SearchGuard,” a JavaScript CAPTCHA-style challenge that verifies queries come from real users rather than automated bots. The court found the theory doesn’t hold: Section 1201’s anti-circumvention rules exist to protect access to copyrighted works, and Google’s search results are largely compilations of publicly available web content that Google itself doesn’t own. Because SearchGuard blocks scraping regardless of whether any given result contains copyrighted material — and isn’t narrowly tailored to protect only the occasional licensed image in a Knowledge Panel — it fails the statute’s core requirement. The judge also noted Google never alleged it deployed the measure with the authority of any copyright owner, as 1201 demands. The dismissal was granted with leave to refile.