Reddit Didn't Beat Perplexity on Copyright — It Won on a Lock, and That Changes the Playbook

A federal judge in Manhattan let Reddit's lawsuit against Perplexity proceed yesterday, and the interesting part is not that Reddit won a round. It is which claim survived.

Reddit did not get to advance on the theory most people assume drives these cases — that an AI company copied protected work. It advanced on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provision, which is not about copying at all. It is about breaking a lock.

What the court decided

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, Southern District of New York, ruled on July 31 on the defendants' motions to dismiss.

Claim	Against	Outcome
DMCA §1201(a) — anti-circumvention	Perplexity and SerpApi	Proceeds
DMCA §1201(b) — trafficking	SerpApi	Dismissed
Unfair competition	Both	Dismissed
Unjust enrichment	Both	Dismissed

Reddit alleges the defendants harvested user posts at industrial scale by scraping Google's search results and rotating IP addresses to evade the technical blocks that Reddit and Google use, then sold the data on. Reporting on the case names further scraping firms — Oxylabs and AWMProxy — alongside Perplexity and SerpApi.

Note the shape of that table: this is a partial win, not a rout. Reddit lost three of the four claims at issue.

Why the surviving claim is the one that matters

Reddit has an awkward problem in any straightforward copyright case: it does not own the posts. Its users wrote them and hold the copyright. At oral argument in late July, the judge was reported to be sceptical of Reddit's assertion that it could sue for infringement on its users' behalf.

Section 1201 routes around that entirely. It does not ask who owns the work. It asks whether there was a technological measure controlling access, and whether someone circumvented it — and it lets "any person injured … bring a civil action," language Judge Engelmayer leaned on in rejecting the defendants' standing challenge. He found Reddit "epitomizes the 'global digital on-line marketplace for copyrighted works' that the DMCA sought to promote," and that its injuries fall within the provision's zone of interests.

What you must show	Copyright infringement	DMCA §1201
That you own the work	Yes	No
That copying occurred	Yes	No
That a fair-use defence fails	Usually the whole fight	Not the same analysis
That a technical barrier was bypassed	Irrelevant	Yes — this is the case

That is a materially lower bar than the one the newspaper and author suits are climbing, and it is available to platforms that host other people's content rather than owning it. If it holds up, it is a remedy purpose-built for exactly Reddit's situation.

It also denies AI companies the argument they have been doing best with. The newspaper and author cases turn on fair use, where defendants have had real success. Section 1201 does not pose that question — it asks whether a barrier was bypassed, and rotating IP addresses to defeat bot detection is a harder fact pattern to defend on those terms. Should the theory survive appeal, the set of potential plaintiffs is large: forums, review sites, marketplaces and social networks all host content they do not own, and all of them run bot detection.

The genuinely novel bit: the lock was Google's

Here is the detail most coverage will skip. The technological measure the court accepted was Google's SearchGuard — Google's own anti-scraping protection — not something Reddit deployed.

The alleged route was: Reddit content sits in Google's index; scrapers bypass Google's protections to pull it out of search results; the data reaches Perplexity. So Reddit is asserting an anti-circumvention claim over the evasion of a third party's access control. Per legal-trade reporting on the order, the judge found SearchGuard qualifies as a measure controlling access to a work for §1201(a) purposes.

We could not read the order itself, so the claim-by-claim breakdown and the SearchGuard holding here come from reports of the ruling rather than the document.

What the defendants say

Perplexity's position is that it "works within the existing rules." SerpApi's argument is narrower and, on its face, not frivolous: its lawyer has said the company "accesses public search results, not Reddit's platform," and that "public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it."

That is the real fault line. If a company only ever touches Google's public results pages, is it circumventing an access control on Reddit's work? The court has said Reddit has pleaded enough to find out. It has not said Reddit is right.

Why this connects to the crawler wars

The practical consequence is that technical blocking becomes legally load-bearing. A robots.txt file is a request; a rate limiter, a bot-detection system or an IP block is a measure — and under this reading, going around one can be unlawful independent of what you do with the content afterwards.

That changes the calculus behind moves like Cloudflare's decision to block AI crawlers by default. Deploying a barrier stops being purely an ops decision and starts being the predicate for a claim. It also sharpens the incentive to license rather than scrape — the market that startups selling licensed training data have been betting on, and the friction already visible in the publisher backlash against AI search.

There is a structural echo of something we wrote about yesterday, too. Export controls miss model distillation because they regulate artifacts while the value moves through outputs. Copyright law has the mirror-image problem: it regulates the work while the value moves through access. Section 1201 is the one instrument aimed at the access layer, which is why it is suddenly interesting.

The case against reading too much into this

Four reasons to hold this loosely.

It is a motion to dismiss. At this stage the court assumes Reddit's allegations are true and asks only whether they would state a claim. Nothing has been proven, no evidence has been weighed, and "the case proceeds" is not "the defendants circumvented anything."

Reddit lost most of the claims. Three of four were dismissed. A headline about Reddit advancing its suit is accurate and also flattering.

The third-party-lock theory is untested. Predicating a §1201 claim on someone else's access control is novel. It is exactly the kind of holding an appellate court narrows later, and SerpApi's public-results argument has not been rejected on the merits.

A broad §1201 has costs. Anti-circumvention has been criticised for years for catching security research, interoperability work and archiving along with piracy. A reading expansive enough to cover competitive scraping is expansive enough to cover things most people think should be legal. That concern does not disappear because the defendant this time is an AI company.

And this is one district judge. It carries no appellate weight yet.