Federal Judge Dismisses Google's DMCA Lawsuit Against Search Scraper

A federal judge threw out Google's copyright claims against SerpApi, ruling that anti-bot systems don't turn public search results into protected copyrighted works — and the company that built a trillion-dollar business crawling everyone else's content can't use copyright law to stop others from doing the same.

On July 20, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's lawsuit against SerpApi — a 40-person company that scrapes Google Search results and sells them through an API. Google had argued that bypassing its anti-bot system, SearchGuard, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provision, the same law written to stop people from cracking DVD encryption.

The ruling split into two parts. For standard search results — links, snippets, and public information — the dismissal came with prejudice, meaning permanently. The court found that where search results contain no copyrighted content, there is nothing for SearchGuard to be protecting in the copyright sense. The DMCA protects access to a copyrighted work, not access to a website.

For search results containing licensed images (such as those in Knowledge Panels), the court also dismissed — but with leave to amend. The problem: Google doesn't own those images. The DMCA requires that a protective measure operate with the authority of the copyright owner, and Google pleaded no facts showing third-party image owners authorized SearchGuard on their behalf.

The ruling crystallizes a metaphor SerpApi's lawyers used in their motion: "The lock has to be on the book, not the building." A general anti-bot system guarding all of google.com does not become a copyright measure just because some licensed images happen to sit somewhere inside.

The decision carries weight beyond this single case. Platforms have been steadily losing the legal tools they once used against scraping. The Ninth Circuit's hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn ruling already established that scraping publicly available data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Terms-of-service claims fall under contract law, not federal anti-hacking statutes. Google's DMCA theory was one of the last remaining arrows in the quiver — and the court just broke it.

Google has 21 days to amend its complaint for the Knowledge Panel claims. But the broad theory — that an anti-bot system is a DMCA access control over search results generally — is dead in this district.

SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy called the ruling a win for open access to public data: "The internet's founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation."

The irony has not been lost on observers: Google, a company that built a trillion-dollar business by crawling and indexing everyone else's content, tried to use copyright law to stop someone from crawling its own public pages. The court wasn't buying it.

Sources: ScrapeBadger, Search Engine Journal