A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Google filed against web scraping service SerpApi. Google had alleged that SerpApi violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by bypassing its 'SearchGuard' anti-bot technology to scrape search results. The court ruled that plain and aggregated search results are not protected by copyright law and that Google could not use the DMCA to block the scraping of uncopyrighted public data.
The judge dismissed claims related to non-copyrighted search results permanently. However, for results that include copyrighted material, such as licensed images in Knowledge Panels, the judge granted Google 21 days to amend its complaint. To proceed, Google must demonstrate it was authorized by the copyright owners to implement access-control measures on their behalf, a point not sufficiently argued in the original complaint.