Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

A federal judge dismissed Google's DMCA lawsuit against SerpAPI, a company that scrapes Google search results to create an unauthorized API, ruling that Google lacks a legitimate copyright claim to the data. The dismissal highlights the irony that Google's own business was built on web scraping, and the judge found that using DMCA anti-circumvention laws to prevent scraping of an open website stretches the law beyond its intended purpose of protecting digital rights management systems.