Google scraped the web to build itself. A court just said others can scrape Google.

Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google.

On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi. The firm scrapes Google search results and resells them as structured data. Google had sued in December under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing SerpApi circumvented its anti-bot defences to lift copyrighted material.

The problem, the court found, is that search results are not copyrighted material.

Why the case fell apart

The DMCA provision Google used, Section 1201, only protects technology that guards copyrighted works. Google’s barrier, called SearchGuard, guards its search results.

Plain results such as URLs, snippets and factual index data are public facts, not works, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled. Those claims were thrown out with no chance to refile.

“Google has not alleged a plausible...

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