SerpApi this week filed a renewed motion to dismiss Reddit's amended lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, asking Judge Paul Adam Engelmayer to throw out the case with prejudice. The filing - Document 59 in Case No. 25-cv-8736 - represents the Austin, Texas-based company's second attempt to end litigation that has grown steadily more complex since Reddit first filed suit on October 22, 2025.

The core argument is simple, even if the legal terrain is not. Reddit, according to SerpApi's lawyers at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, does not own the content it is trying to protect. Its own user agreement states that Redditors retain ownership of their posts, leaving Reddit with only a non-exclusive license. That distinction, according to the 34-page memorandum of law, is fatal to every count in the amended complaint.

What Reddit actually sued over

Reddit's complaint, filed on October 22, 2025 and later amended on February 6, 2026, names four defendants: SerpApi LLC, Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI, Inc. The theory is that these companies bypassed technological controls to harvest Reddit content from Google search engine results pages (SERPs), thereby circumventing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions under 17 U.S.C. § 1201.

Reddit never alleged that SerpApi accessed Reddit's own servers. The complaint is explicit: SerpApi accessed Google's publicly available SERPs. According to subpoena data Reddit obtained from Google, during a two-week period in July 2025, SerpApi alone accessed 784,006,306 SERPs containing Reddit data between July 1-6, and 1,057,744,585 between July 7-13. Oxylabs and AWMProxy added another 1.26 billion accesses during the same period. Those numbers are large. Whether they constitute a legal wrong is the question now before the court.

SerpApi's renewed challenge

SerpApi filed its first motion to dismiss on January 2, 2026, after the court extended the company's deadline from December 22, 2025. Reddit responded by filing a First Amended Complaint on February 6, 2026, adding new allegations designed to address the weaknesses SerpApi had identified. The court set March 13, 2026 as the deadline for SerpApi and Perplexity to respond to the amended complaint. SerpApi met that deadline today.

The renewed motion raises seven distinct grounds for dismissal. Each is grounded in the argument that Reddit has stretched the DMCA well beyond its intended scope.

Standing: the threshold problem

The first and most structurally significant argument concerns Article III standing - the constitutional requirement that a plaintiff demonstrate a concrete, particularized injury fairly traceable to the defendant's conduct. SerpApi argues Reddit has not met that bar.

Reddit claims three categories of injury. First, reputational harm and loss of user trust arising from its inability to control user-generated content. Second, lost licensing revenue that it would allegedly have earned from AI companies. Third, costs incurred building and maintaining anti-scraping infrastructure. According to the filing, each fails.

On the reputational harm claim, the motion notes that Reddit's own Privacy Policy, updated on January 6, 2026, tells users their content "may also be available in search results on internet search engines like Google or in responses provided by an AI chatbot." Reddit cannot plausibly claim injury from users discovering their posts appear in Google results when Reddit's own policies disclose that outcome. The filing cites the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International for the proposition that a party cannot manufacture standing by voluntarily spending money to guard against speculative future harm.

On lost licensing revenue, the argument is that Reddit identifies no specific commercial opportunity that SerpApi's conduct actually foreclosed. The reference to Google's lawsuit as evidence of diminished licensing value is, the motion argues, inapposite - Google was describing its relationship with its own users, not with Reddit.

Even if Reddit had constitutional standing, the motion argues it lacks statutory standing under 17 U.S.C. § 1203(a), which permits suit by "[a]ny person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202." The DMCA's zone of interests, the filing contends, extends only to copyright owners. Reddit is not the copyright owner of user-generated content. It holds a non-exclusive license. That is a fundamental distinction in copyright law: a non-exclusive licensee "may not sue others for infringement," citing the Second Circuit's 2018 ruling in John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. DRK Photo.

No court has extended DMCA standing to a plaintiff in Reddit's position. The 2023 VidAngel LLC v. ClearPlay, Inc.ruling from the District of Utah was explicit: the court was "not aware of any cases extending the cause of action in Section 1203 beyond copyright owners and owners of an access control measure." Reddit does not own the access control measure either - that is Google's SearchGuard system. Reddit is, in the filing's framing, attempting to enforce someone else's rights over someone else's technology to protect content it does not own.

Reddit's February 6 amended complaint attempted to cure this by claiming it authored certain minimal content that appeared in Google SERPs, including a boilerplate policy notice and a date stamp. The motion addresses each of the four example snippets Reddit cited. One is a partial policy statement about private messages. Another is a list of movie titles from a user comment - "Inception, LotR trilogy, Fifth Element, The Princess bride, Blues Brothers, Mouse Hunt." A third consists of a date, "May 17, 2024," and a truncated fragment. The fourth is a short description of a jazz club address. None of these, the motion argues, meets the threshold for copyright protection. Short phrases, lists of titles, factual addresses, and dates are not copyrightable under established law. Without a copyrightable work, there can be no DMCA violation.

The "effective access control" problem

A separate technical argument targets the nature of Google's SearchGuard system. The DMCA protects only technological measures that effectively control access to a protected work. Courts have consistently required that such measures actually prevent access - functioning like a locked door requiring a key.

Reddit's amended complaint concedes the point in its own language. SearchGuard, according to Reddit's filing, allows human users to access Google SERPs "seamlessly" and "without disrupting the user experience." In SerpApi's telling, that admission is dispositive. A measure that leaves one route of access permanently open cannot qualify as an "effective" access control under Section 1201. The Sixth Circuit's Lexmark ruling put it plainly: "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."

SerpApi's conduct, in this framing, involves "mimicking human behavior" to retrieve the same search results that any person with a browser can access without authorization. That is not circumvention as the DMCA defines it - which covers acts like decryption, descrambling, or bypassing password protection.

The broader stakes for AI data markets

The litigation sits at the intersection of two unresolved tensions in digital markets: how platforms can control content they do not own, and how copyright law applies to publicly accessible information assembled from third-party sources.

PPC Land's earlier coverage of the original complaint placed the case in context: Reddit has entered paid data licensing agreements with companies including Google and OpenAI, and views unauthorized scraping as an existential threat to that revenue stream. Reddit's S-1 registration statement, filed on February 22, 2024, described its data corpus as valuable precisely because it offers "real-time access to evolving and dynamic topics." The platform has also sued Anthropic in a separate case filed on June 4, 2025, in San Francisco Superior Court for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition.

The parallel legal battle between Google and SerpApi - filed in the Northern District of California on December 19, 2025 - raises identical questions about whether bot-detection systems qualify as DMCA-protected access controls. SerpApi filed its motion to dismiss in that case on February 20, 2026, and a hearing is scheduled for May 19, 2026.

SerpApi's general counsel Chad Anson responded publicly to the Google case in January, framing the dispute as a clash over whether platforms can use copyright law to wall off publicly visible information. The Reddit motion today extends that argument: if Reddit's theory is accepted, any platform could invoke DMCA protections over user-generated content it does not own, effectively privatising information posted by millions of people without their knowledge or consent.

SerpApi, founded in 2017 in Austin, Texas by CEO Julien Khaleghy, lists clients including the United Nations, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and Shopify. The company markets a Google Search API that allows developers to retrieve structured data from SERPs programmatically, running, according to its website, more than 100,000 searches per hour. Its "Ludicrous Speed Max" feature uses, in its own description, "4x the server resources to automatically create numerous parallel requests."

The competition and conspiracy claims

Beyond the DMCA counts, Reddit's amended complaint included claims for unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy. The motion addresses each. On unfair competition, SerpApi argues the claim is preempted by the Copyright Act and, in any event, that SerpApi and Reddit do not compete with each other - Reddit hosts community discussion, SerpApi retrieves structured data from search engines. On unjust enrichment, the motion argues the claim is preempted, duplicative of the DMCA counts, and fails to identify any specific or direct benefit conferred on SerpApi. On civil conspiracy, the motion notes that civil conspiracy is not an independent tort under New York law; it requires an underlying tortious act, and if the DMCA claims fail, the conspiracy claim falls with them.

Why dismissal with prejudice

SerpApi is not just asking the court to dismiss the case - it is asking for dismissal with prejudice, meaning Reddit would be barred from amending its complaint a third time. The argument is that Reddit has already had one opportunity to address the deficiencies identified in the January 2026 motion, and failed. Allowing a further amendment would require SerpApi to spend additional resources moving to dismiss a third time. Courts have granted dismissal with prejudice in similar circumstances under Second Circuit precedent.

The case is assigned to Judge Paul Adam Engelmayer and Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses. As of March 13, 2026, not all defendants have been served: AWMProxy and Oxylabs had not yet responded to the amended complaint, with only SerpApi and Perplexity meeting the March 13 deadline for their responses.

Timeline

  • February 22, 2024 - Reddit and Google announce a data licensing partnership enabling programmatic access to Reddit content for use in Google's products
  • May 2024 - Reddit sends a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI over unauthorized use of Reddit data
  • September 14, 2025 - Google eliminates the num=100 SERP parameter, significantly affecting how data tools access search results (PPC Land)
  • October 22, 2025 - Reddit files lawsuit against SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI in the Southern District of New York, Case No. 25-cv-8736 (PPC Land)
  • October 23, 2025 - Case assigned to Judge Paul A. Engelmayer; Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses also designated
  • November 5-6, 2025 - SerpApi enters appearance through Weil, Gotshal & Manges; court extends SerpApi's response deadline to December 22, 2025
  • December 19, 2025 - Google separately files a DMCA lawsuit against SerpApi in the Northern District of California (PPC Land)
  • January 2, 2026 - SerpApi and Perplexity both file motions to dismiss Reddit's original complaint; court orders Reddit to amend by January 23, 2026
  • January 12, 2026 - Court extends Reddit's amendment deadline to February 6, 2026
  • January 23, 2026 - SerpApi General Counsel Chad Anson publishes public response to Google's lawsuit (PPC Land)
  • February 6, 2026 - Reddit files its First Amended Complaint against all four defendants; court sets March 13, 2026 as the new response deadline
  • February 20, 2026 - SerpApi files motion to dismiss in the Google case in the Northern District of California (PPC Land)
  • March 13, 2026 - SerpApi files Document 59, its renewed motion to dismiss Reddit's amended complaint with prejudice, in the Southern District of New York

Summary

Who: SerpApi LLC, an Austin, Texas-based search API company founded in 2017, is the defendant that today filed a renewed motion to dismiss in Case No. 25-cv-8736. Reddit, Inc., a San Francisco-based social media platform with over 100 million daily active users, is the plaintiff. Co-defendants Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI, Inc. are also named in the underlying amended complaint.

What: SerpApi today filed a 34-page memorandum of law asking the Southern District of New York to dismiss Reddit's First Amended Complaint with prejudice. The motion argues that Reddit lacks both constitutional and statutory standing to bring DMCA claims over content it does not own, that Google's SearchGuard system does not qualify as an effective access control under the statute, that the content snippets at issue are not copyrightable, and that all of Reddit's non-DMCA state law claims are preempted by federal copyright law.

When: The motion was filed today, March 13, 2026. The underlying lawsuit was originally filed on October 22, 2025. Reddit filed its amended complaint on February 6, 2026.

Where: The case is before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, assigned to Judge Paul Adam Engelmayer. SerpApi is based in Austin, Texas at 5540 N. Lamar Blvd. Reddit is headquartered in San Francisco with offices at One World Trade Center in New York.

Why: The case matters because Reddit is attempting to use the DMCA - a statute designed to prevent decryption and piracy of copyrighted works - to control access to publicly visible user-generated content that Reddit does not own. SerpApi argues that accepting Reddit's theory would allow any platform to weaponise copyright law to block access to public information posted by millions of users, with direct consequences for how AI companies, researchers, and marketing tools access and use publicly available data from search engines.

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