A US judge dismisses Google's lawsuit against web scraping service SerpApi, saying plain and aggregated search results are not protected under copyright law
Last December, Google sued SerpApi over scraping its search results, and now a court has granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss the case.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google’s case followed its December suit alleging automated access to its results, positioning search-result data as content it could protect through copyright. The dismissal narrows that argument at the pleading stage by distinguishing plain, aggregated results from copyrightable expression.
The outcome also reverses the role Google occupied in the earlier Genius lyrics-scraping dispute, where courts rejected claims against Google. Together, the cases underline that the legal treatment turns on the material copied rather than on scraping as a label.
First-order effects
- SerpApi avoids Google’s copyright claim for now, while Google loses a judicial route to treat plain aggregated search results as protected works.
- Providers that collect comparable result-page data gain a clearer defense against copyright allegations focused solely on the results’ plain aggregation; the ruling does not itself resolve other possible claims tied to access methods or contracts.
Second-order effects
- Google may have to rely more heavily on technical access controls and non-copyright legal theories when contesting automated collection of search-result data.
- Search-data customers and competing scraping services gain more confidence that copyright alone may be an unreliable basis for restricting access to plain result outputs, potentially strengthening demand for such data.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to separate facts and basic aggregations from protectable expression, control over search-data reuse will shift toward platform rules, authentication, and technical enforcement rather than copyright.
- The decision adds to a broader contest over who can govern data that is publicly displayed but commercially valuable, with outcomes likely to vary by the content copied and the means used to obtain it.
The trend: Platforms are increasingly testing whether copyright can control downstream use of publicly displayed data, while courts scrutinize the protectability of the underlying output.