Reddit's 'AI Scraping' Lawsuit Is an Attack on the Open Internet (www.techdirt.com)

Reddit sued several scraping firms and AI answer engine Perplexity, not for copying Reddit posts directly but for allegedly using unofficial APIs and proxy networks to scrape Google search result pages (SERPs) that link to Reddit content. The complaint leans on the DMCA’s anti‑circumvention rule (17 U.S.C. §1201), claiming defendants “circumvented” technological control measures (TCMs) deployed by Google and Reddit to restrict automated access. Reddit also demands licensing and payments from AI providers that surface or cite Reddit posts; Perplexity says it doesn’t train its models on Reddit and primarily provides links as citations the way a search engine would. If the suit succeeds, it could set a precedent that weaponizes §1201 to block third parties from programmatically accessing public web content via intermediaries like search engines, even when the site owner doesn’t own the underlying copyrights (Reddit users retain them). Technically, the case targets common scraping techniques—IP rotation, proxy pools, user‑agent masking, and unofficial SERP APIs—used to surface public links. That interpretation would threaten search, archiving, text‑and‑data‑mining, citation‑based AI workflows, and the “programmable web” model developers rely on, effectively creating toll booths around publicly indexable content and chilling innovation across AI, search, and web research.