SerpApi filed a motion to dismiss Google’s federal lawsuit, two months after Google sued the company under the DMCA for allegedly bypassing its SearchGuard anti-scraping system.
The filing goes beyond disputing the technical allegations. SerpApi is challenging whether Google has the legal right to bring the case at all.
The Standing Question
SerpApi’s core argument is that the DMCA protects copyright owners, not companies that display others’ content.
Google’s complaint cited licensed images in Knowledge Panels, merchant-supplied photos in Shopping results, and third-party content in Maps as examples of copyrighted material SerpApi allegedly scraped.
SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy wrote that the content in Google’s search results belongs to publishers, authors, and creators, not to Google.
Khaleghy writes:
“Google is a website operator. It is not the copyright holder of the information it surfaces.”
Khaleghy argued that only a copyright holder can authorize access controls under the DMCA. Google, he wrote, is trying to assert those rights without the knowledge or consent of the creators whose work is at issue.
In the 31-page motion, SerpApi invokes the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., which established that a plaintiff must show injuries within the “zone of interests” the law was designed to protect. SerpApi argues Google’s alleged injuries, including infrastructure costs and lost ad revenue from automated queries, don’t fall within what the DMCA was built to address.
The Circumvention Question
SerpApi also disputes whether bypassing SearchGuard counts as circumvention under the DMCA.
Google alleged in December that SerpApi solved JavaScript challenges, used rotating IP addresses, and mimicked human browser behavior to get past SearchGuard.
Khaleghy wrote that the DMCA defines “to circumvent a technological measure,” in part, as “to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure,” and argued SerpApi does none of those things.
Khaleghy writes:
“We access publicly visible web pages, the same ones accessible to any browser. We do not break encryption. We do not disable authentication systems.”
The motion states Google “does not allege unscrambling or decryption of any work, or the impairment, deactivation, or removal of any access system.” SerpApi calls SearchGuard a bot-management tool, not a copyright access control.
Why This Matters
The outcome could reach beyond SerpApi. Google’s DMCA theory, if accepted, would let any platform displaying licensed third-party content use the statute to block automated access to publicly visible pages.
When we covered Google’s original filing in December, I noted the central question was whether SearchGuard qualifies as a DMCA-protected access control. SerpApi’s motion now adds a layer underneath that. Even if SearchGuard qualifies, SerpApi argues Google isn’t the right party to enforce it.
In a separate case decided on December 15, 2025, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein dismissed Ziff Davis’s DMCA Section 1201(a) anti-circumvention claim tied to robots.txt against OpenAI, holding Ziff Davis failed to plausibly allege that robots.txt is a technological measure that effectively controls access, or that OpenAI circumvented it.
Google’s SearchGuard is more technically complex than a robots.txt directive, but both cases test whether the DMCA can be used to restrict automated access to publicly available content.
Looking Ahead
The hearing on SerpApi’s motion is scheduled for May 19, 2026. Google will file its opposition before then.
SerpApi also filed a motion to dismiss in a separate lawsuit brought by Reddit in October, which named SerpApi alongside Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy. Both cases raise questions about using DMCA anti-circumvention claims to challenge bot evasion and automated access to pages that are viewable in a normal browser.
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