Source: AI Weekly

A U.S. District Judge in the Southern District of New York, Paul A. Engelmayer, declined to dismiss Reddit’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act anti‑circumvention claims under Section 1201(a) against Perplexity AI and the web‑scraping provider SerpApi, allowing Reddit’s core theory to move forward. The court accepted Reddit’s allegation that Google’s SearchGuard, an anti‑scraping system that uses CAPTCHAs, qualifies as a measure that controls access to online copyrighted works and found that Reddit’s asserted injuries fall “within the zone of interests” protected by the DMCA, quoting that Reddit “epitomizes the ‘global digital on‑line marketplace for copyrighted works’ that the DMCA sought to promote.”

The judge simultaneously dismissed a Section 1201(b) trafficking claim against SerpApi and threw out unfair competition and unjust enrichment counts against both defendants, and the ruling is a motion‑to‑dismiss decision rather than a merits determination. The decision contrasts with a sibling case in which a judge dismissed similar DMCA claims Google brought against SerpApi, creating a doctrinal split likely to attract appellate review; reporting notes uncertainty about Perplexity’s specific ingestion practices, whether Reddit has parallel suits against other AI firms, and how this ruling interacts with Reddit’s paid licensing deals. The reporting warns that if third‑party anti‑bot systems can serve as access controls for others’ copyrighted content, the DMCA exposure for AI systems that rely on scraped web data may broaden, advantaging platforms with high‑value user content and licensed data vendors.