Google lost its DMCA case against SerpApi, a Texas company that sells scraped search results through an API, after U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the complaint Monday with leave to amend. Rogers sided with SerpApi's argument that Google cannot invoke the anti-circumvention provisions over material it neither owns nor licenses, which covers most of what sits on a search results page. Google can refile only over licensed content such as the copyrighted photographs in its Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels, and only if it alleges those copyright owners authorized the anti-copying measures. Last year's complaint accused SerpApi of routing around Google's SearchGuard bot defenses and automatically solving CAPTCHAs, and estimated it sends hundreds of millions of artificial search requests a day.
