Google has confirmed it will keep pursuing its DMCA lawsuit against web scraper SerpApi despite a court dismissing the case last week, in an unusual legal fight over AI bots scraping search results. The judge found Google lacked standing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it does not own the copyrighted content appearing in its search results and had not shown it was acting on behalf of rights holders, making the ruling a notable early setback for Google's attempt to use copyright law to curb AI scraping.

Google sued SerpApi in December, accusing it of circumventing anti-scraping technology and reselling scraped search content via an unauthorised "Google Search API" service, a move it said followed Reddit's similar October lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity. Legal expert Meredith Rose of Public Knowledge told Ars Technica the companies are "grasping at whatever tool is available" against rising AI scraping, even though the DMCA approach is a poor fit since neither firm owns the disputed content. Reddit, whose own case faced a dismissal hearing last Thursday, may now struggle for the same reason, as the DMCA requires a claimant to be a copyright owner, exclusive licensee, or the deployer of the protection measure at issue.