SerpApi yesterday filed a motion to dismiss Google's DMCA lawsuit, arguing Google lacks standing as a non-copyright holder using anti-scraping tools to protect ad revenue, not creative works.
SerpApi yesterday filed a motion to dismiss Google's federal lawsuit over web scraping, turning the case into a direct challenge to the search giant's standing to invokecopyright law to protect what the Texas company calls publicly accessible information. The filing, submitted to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on February 20, 2026, frames the dispute not merely as a technical legal skirmish but as a fundamental question about who controls access to the public internet.
The case, assigned case number 25-cv-10826-YGR before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, is scheduled for a hearing on May 19, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. in Courtroom 1 on the fourth floor of the federal courthouse. SerpApi is represented by Proskauer Rose LLP, with lead counsel Joseph E. Clark of the firm's New York office.
Google had filed the underlying lawsuit on December 19, 2025, alleging that SerpApi violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing SearchGuard, Google's bot-detection system, to scrape search results on what the complaint describes as "billions of separate occasions." Google's complaint sought statutory damages ranging from $200 to $2,500 for each circumvention act. The suit came after Google had eliminated the n=100 SERP parameter on September 14, 2025, a move that significantly impacted how tools access search result data.
SerpApi's motion rests on seven legal questions, the first and arguably most decisive being whether Google has any standing to bring a DMCA claim at all. The argument is pointed: the DMCA is a copyright protection statute, not a mechanism for website operators to control who can access publicly available information.
According to the motion, "Google does not hold a copyright in its search results. It displays other people's information - information they chose to make publicly available." The filing argues that Google is a website operator and, at most, a non-exclusive licensee of certain images that appear in its Knowledge Panels. Neither of those roles, the motion contends, falls within the "zone of interests" that Congress sought to protect when it enacted the DMCA.
The legal framework SerpApi invokes here is the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., which established that statutory standing requires a plaintiff to show injuries that "fall within the zone of interests protected by the law invoked." Google's injuries as a search engine operator - infrastructure costs, reduced advertising revenue from automated queries - are not, according to SerpApi, the kinds of injuries the DMCA was designed to redress.
The motion draws a sharp analogy: "Extending standing to website operators would be akin to permitting the locksmith or home builder to sue just because a book happens to sit inside the house. The statute protects the book's author, not the architect."
One of the more striking passages in the 31-page filing involves the mathematics of Google's own theory. According to SerpApi's motion, if Google's interpretation of the DMCA were correct - treating each of billions of automated queries as a separate circumvention act - the resulting statutory damages would exceed $7 trillion. That figure surpasses United States gross domestic product.
According to SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy's accompanying blog post, "if you do the math, even using the minimal numbers alleged, Google's DMCA statutory damages would amount to a mere $7.06 trillion." The motion itself uses that figure as evidence that Congress never intended the DMCA to be applied this way. Penalties of that magnitude, the argument runs, are a signal of statutory misapplication rather than legitimate copyright enforcement.
The scale of potential liability had already been flagged as a distinguishing feature of this case when it was first filed. PPC Land's earlier coverage noted that potential statutory liability could theoretically exceed SerpApi's ability to pay given the massive number of alleged violations - a pressure point that gives copyright-based enforcement a qualitatively different character from breach-of-contract claims.
A significant portion of the motion is devoted to Google's bot-detection system, which Google calls SearchGuard. The central technical argument is that SearchGuard is a website control measure, not a copyright access control measure, and that the DMCA only covers the latter.
According to the filing, SearchGuard "operates at the domain level. It does not separate or segregate copyrighted content from the reams of non-copyrighted public data it displays." The system blocks automated access to google.com across the board, regardless of whether any particular search result contains licensed content. It makes no distinction between queries that would return copyrighted thumbnails in a Knowledge Panel and queries that would return only links to third-party websites.
The motion calls SearchGuard "ephemeral." Once a search result appears on a user's screen, the information is no longer protected by any access control at all - it can be freely copied, pasted, forwarded, or republished without encountering any technological measure. The filing illustrates this concretely using Google's own complaint, which includes a screenshot of a Knowledge Panel for baseball player Willie Mays. That Knowledge Panel - including a single licensed image that Google highlighted as an example of the copyrighted content it was trying to protect - was reproduced in the court filing having been obtained, according to SerpApi's lawyers, "without accessing google.com, encountering SearchGuard, violating Google's Terms of Use, or even being in privity with Google."
The Sixth Circuit's reasoning in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. at the appellate level provides the key precedent here. According to that ruling, "just as one would not say that a lock on the back door of a house controls access to a house whose front door does not contain a lock, ... it does not make sense to say that the ... DMCA applies to otherwise readily-accessible copyrighted works." The front door, SerpApi argues, is every original website that Google scraped - all of which remain fully accessible without encountering SearchGuard.
The motion also names the system pointedly: "The name itself - 'SearchGuard,' not 'CopyrightGuard' - says it all." Google's own complaint, according to the filing, acknowledges that SearchGuard's purpose is to prevent automated access because Google does not "generate advertising revenue when the queries are automated." That admission, the motion argues, is fatal to the DMCA claim - the statute protects copyright interests, not advertising business models.
What makes the case unusual is that SerpApi's defense leans heavily on Google's own behavior. The motion opens by describing Google as "the largest scraper on the planet," noting that the company built its entire business by deploying bots to crawl publicly accessible pages across the internet - copying content, indexing it, and serving it back to users without asking permission and without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material.
According to Khaleghy's blog post, "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."
The motion puts the comparison this way: SerpApi "does to Google what Google does to everyone else. Just like Google - but on a much smaller scale - SerpApi uses automated means to scrape public websites and collect data, which it then makes available to its customers in ways it believes they will find relevant and useful."
PPC Land has tracked this tension since Google filed its complaint, noting that Google scrapes billions of web pages for AI training and search indexing while simultaneously demanding legal protection against companies that scrape its own search results. The dynamic has particular resonance for publishers, who lack the legal tools to stop Google from extracting their content for AI training but find Google invoking those same tools to prevent others from accessing its search results.
The motion challenges Google's characterization of SerpApi's methods as "circumvention" under the DMCA's technical definition. The statute defines circumvention narrowly as the act of descrambling, decrypting, or otherwise avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing a technological measure.
According to the filing, Google does not allege any of those things. What Google actually alleges is that SerpApi solved JavaScript challenges posed by SearchGuard, sent requests through multiple IP addresses to stay within rate limits, and mimicked human-controlled browsers. The motion argues that solving a challenge is not the same as bypassing it. "Knocking on the door and being let in - even if one is wearing a mask - is not the same as drilling a hole in the wall and climbing through."
The Ninth Circuit's 2022 ruling in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. governs the analysis here, according to the motion. In that case, the appeals court found that with respect to "websites made freely accessible on the Internet, the 'breaking and entering' analogue invoked so frequently during congressional consideration has no application, and the concept of without authorization is inapt." LinkedIn, like Google, operated a publicly accessible platform and sought to use legal process to prevent scraping. The Ninth Circuit declined to permit it.
The motion also addresses Google's robots.txt argument specifically. Disregarding robots.txt instructions - essentially a file that tells crawlers where not to go - is described in the filing as "no different than disregarding a sign to 'stay off the grass.' It is not circumvention of a technological measure." Courts in multiple jurisdictions have declined to treat robots.txt as the equivalent of digital password protection.
A separate but equally important argument in the motion concerns authorization. The DMCA only protects access controls implemented "with the authority of the copyright owner." Google does not own the copyrights to the content in its search results. It displays content created by tens of millions of publishers, authors, and other creators who have never authorized Google to restrict others from accessing that content.
According to the filing, "when Google scrapes LinkedIn, it doesn't communicate with the post's creator. So, apart from Google's failure to allege that every search contains copyrighted material, its failure to allege copyright owner authorization independently bars its claim." The words "authority" and "copyright owner" do not appear in Google's complaint - a telling omission, the motion suggests, because Google could not plausibly allege such authorization.
Google's narrower fallback claim - that some results contain content it has licensed from third parties - fares no better under this analysis. Google holds only non-exclusive display rights to those images. Non-exclusive licensees cannot authorize access controls, and Google does not allege that any of its licensors granted it the power to restrict how others access the same content elsewhere.
The case sits at the intersection of search data access, advertising market competition, and the legal infrastructure of the open web - all topics with direct implications for marketers and their tools. SerpApi's customer base includes developers, researchers, and businesses whose products depend on programmatic access to search data. A ruling in Google's favor would significantly limit that access, concentrating control over search data in Google's hands.
SerpApi had already signaled its position in January 2026, when general counsel Chad Anson published a detailed statement arguing that Google's SearchGuard constitutes a traffic management tool rather than a copyright protection system. "That law was written to protect encrypted DVDs and software from piracy, not to let platforms block access to publicly visible web content," according to that statement.
This broader context matters for anyone who uses third-party tools to access search data - SEO platforms, competitive intelligence tools, ad monitoring services, and AI training pipelines all rely on the principle that publicly visible information remains publicly accessible. A successful DMCA claim by Google could make SearchGuard legally equivalent to DVD encryption, turning access to search results into a protected act regardless of the public nature of the information displayed.
The May 19, 2026 hearing will determine whether Judge Gonzalez Rogers allows the case to proceed or dismisses it at this early stage. Motions to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) ask the court to determine whether the plaintiff has stated a legally valid claim, even assuming all factual allegations are true. SerpApi is asking the court to find that Google has not - and cannot - state such a claim regardless of the underlying facts.
Who: SerpApi LLC, a 42-person company based in Austin, Texas providing search engine result APIs to developers, researchers, and businesses; and Google LLC, the plaintiff and the world's dominant search engine.
What: SerpApi today filed a 31-page motion to dismiss Google's federal DMCA lawsuit (Case No. 25-cv-10826-YGR), arguing that Google lacks statutory standing as a non-copyright holder, that its SearchGuard bot-detection system is not a copyright access control measure, that SerpApi's scraping methods do not constitute "circumvention" under the DMCA's technical definition, and that Google has not suffered a cognizable copyright injury.
When: The motion was filed on February 20, 2026. The underlying Google lawsuit was filed on December 19, 2025. A hearing on the motion to dismiss is scheduled for May 19, 2026.
Where: United States District Court for the Northern District of California, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Why: SerpApi argues that Google is attempting to weaponize a copyright statute designed to prevent DVD piracy and software hacking in order to establish a legal monopoly over publicly accessible search data, thereby protecting its advertising revenue rather than any legitimate copyright interest. The case has broad implications for the open web, since a ruling in Google's favor could allow any platform displaying third-party content to invoke the DMCA to block automated access, regardless of whether the information is publicly visible.
