Google Accuses Web-Scraping Company of Copyright Violations (1)

Google LLC sued SerpApi LLC for allegedly bypassing its technological protections to scrape copyrighted content from search results, accusing the Texas company of violating a federal digital copyright law.

The lawsuit centers on Google’s “SearchGuard” system, which uses JavaScript challenges to block automated scraping of search results containing licensed copyrighted material like images in Knowledge Panels, according to a complaint filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Google estimates SerpApi sends hundreds of millions of automated requests daily, with volume increasing 25,000% over the past two years, according to the complaint.

The complaint alleges ...