Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google.
On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi. The firm scrapes Google search results and resells them as structured data. Google had sued in December under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing SerpApi circumvented its anti-bot defences to lift copyrighted material.
The problem, the court found, is that search results are not copyrighted material.
Why the case fell apart
The DMCA provision Google used, Section 1201, only protects technology that guards copyrighted works. Google’s barrier, called SearchGuard, guards its search results.
