A judge let Reddit's scraping case against Perplexity go forward, and the legal theory is the interesting part
Reddit is not arguing copyright infringement. It is arguing that Perplexity and SerpApi got around a technical lock, which is a different law with different consequences for anyone who scrapes the web.
A federal judge in Manhattan has refused to throw out the core of Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity and the data company SerpApi, sending the case to discovery, the stage where both sides have to hand over internal documents. Judge Paul Engelmayer let Reddit’s anti-circumvention claims stand while dismissing a trafficking claim against SerpApi and Reddit’s unfair-competition and unjust-enrichment claims. Reddit shares fell sharply on the day, for reasons that had more to do with earnings than with the ruling.
The legal angle is worth slowing down for, because it is not the usual AI copyright fight. Most cases of the past two years asked whether training a model on someone’s text counts as fair use. Reddit is asking something narrower: whether Perplexity and SerpApi deliberately got around a technical measure that controlled access to its content. That claim comes from the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA, the US copyright law originally written to stop people breaking the copy protection on DVDs. Reddit alleges the defendants harvested its posts through Google search results in a way that evaded its protections, without a licence. Engelmayer accepted, at this stage, that Google’s SearchGuard system can count as a technological measure, and described Reddit as exactly the kind of “global digital online marketplace for copyrighted works” the law was written to protect.
What is behind this. Reddit has spent two years turning its archive of human conversation into a licensed product, with paid deals reported with OpenAI and Google. That business only works if the alternative, taking the data for free, is expensive or illegal. Fair use arguments have been slow and unpredictable in court, so anti-circumvention is an attractive second route: it does not ask whether the use was transformative, only whether someone picked a lock. If that theory survives, it reshapes the economics of AI search, because answer engines are built on continuously crawling other people’s sites. A ruling at the motion-to-dismiss stage is not a finding that Perplexity did anything wrong. It means Reddit’s version of events, if proven, would be against the law.
What this means for you: if you use Perplexity or a similar AI answer engine, nothing changes now, and this case will take a long time. If you publish anything on the web, the practical question this case raises is whether your terms of service and your technical blocks actually match, because the argument turns on there being a measure to circumvent in the first place. And if you build anything that scrapes, the lesson is blunt: the legal risk in 2026 is drifting away from what you do with the data and towards how you obtained it.
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