A federal judge on July 31, 2026 largely denied SerpApi’s motion to dismiss, allowing Reddit’s DMCA claims to proceed. The court found that Reddit had plausibly alleged a conspiracy between SerpApi and Perplexity AI, where Perplexity routed its data collection through Google search results using SerpApi as a technical middleman to circumvent access controls. This allegedly enabled industrial-scale harvesting of hundreds of billions of search results containing user posts and comments for AI training, without licensing agreements or compensation to Reddit. The lawsuit, originally filed on October 22, 2025, also names Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy as additional defendants, seeking damages for lost licensing revenue and security implementation costs. Reddit went public in March 2024 and has since pursued data licensing as a core revenue strategy, signing agreements with several AI firms.
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