IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—N.D. Cal.: Google fails to state DMCA claim against search API provider, (Jul 29, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

Google’s security measures were implemented to protect Google’s own website viewership, not the copyrighted content in search results.

A company that managed to bypass Google’s security measures and scrape its web search results could not have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in doing so because the underlying search results were not themselves copyrightable, the District Court for the Northern District of California has held. The court, in dismissing the search giant’s lawsuit on the pleadings, also found that to the extent that Google served up copyrighted content in a sidebar panel to its results, the company did not adequately allege that its anti-scraping technology measures were implemented on the authority of the actual owners of that content (Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC, No. 4:25-cv-10826-YGR (N.D. Cal. Jul. 20, 2026)).

The target of the lawsuit was SerpAPI, a company that markets application programming interfaces, commonly known as APIs, that allow software developers to integrate search capabilities into their own products. The lawsuit takes aim in particular at SerpAPI’s Google Search API, a software service that it advertises as a method to scrape Google Search results. Google maintains a technological protection measure, which it calls SearchGuard, to prevent unauthorized third parties from automatically accessing and scraping Google Search results. But Google’s lawsuit contends that the API company, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, found a way to circumvent SearchGuard, allowing it to continue to offer the Google Search API to its customers.

SerpAPI moved to dismiss the claim, leading to this opinion.

Statutory standing. The court found that Google had standing to bring its lawsuit. Under Supreme Court doctrine, the court noted, “a statutory cause of action extends only to plaintiffs whose interests fall within the zone of interests protected by the law invoked.” Google claimed that the API company’s conduct harmed it by depriving it of direct website visitors. But although Google owned and operated the technology protection measures that the API company allegedly bypassed, it did not claim protection for the content of the underlying search results themselves. So, was Google within the “zone of interest” protected by the DMCA? Although different courts had reached different conclusions on the question, the court noted, Google had the better argument.

This conclusion arose from the “plain language” of the DMCA, the court found. The statute provides, the court noted, that “any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in an appropriate United States district court for such violation.” That broad language, the court observed, “indicates that the set of people or entities who can sue under the statute is defined by whether they suffered an injury arising out of a violation of the DMCA, and not by whether they are owners or exclusive licensees of copyrighted material.” That interpretation was also consistent with the DMCA’s legislative history, the court noted, “which provides that standing to bring a claim under the DMCA depends on whether a person has suffered an injury arising out of a violation of the DMCA.” Google asserted just such an injury, the court found, so it had standing to bring the lawsuit.

Validity of claim. But although Google had standing to pursue its claim under the DMCA, the court found, the claim it asserted was not a valid one. To begin with, the court noted, a plaintiff who hopes to state a claim under the DMCA must allege that a technological measure effectively controls access to a work that is protected by copyright. But there was nothing copyrightable about basic Google search results, the court noted, as they were simply “compilations of publicly-available information that Google obtains from the internet and organizes for presentation to users on google.com based on relevance.” That did not rule out Google’s claim entirely, the court emphasized, because Google search results are also sometimes accompanied by a “Knowledge Panel” that may contain “some copyrighted content that Google licenses from third parties, such as copyrighted images.” But Google’s claim, if it were to move forward at all, would have to be narrowly tailored to the copyrighted information in those panels and not to the web search results more broadly.

But there was an even bigger problem with Google’s claim, the court found. Under the DMCA, the court noted, technological measures are protected under the DMCA only if, among other things, they “require the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.” The Ninth Circuit has interpreted the “with the authority of the copyright owner” element, the court noted, as requiring a plaintiff “to allege and later prove that the technological measure in question was implemented and functioned with the authority of the copyright owner.” That was fatal to Google’s claim, the court found. Indeed, the court noted, the search giant “does not allege any facts that raise the inference that SearchGuard was implemented and functions to control access to copyrighted components that may be included in Google Search results ‘with the authority of the copyright owner[s].’” The claim would therefore fail.

The Case is No. 4:25-cv-10826-YGR.

Judge: Rogers, Y.

Attorneys: Lucy Yen (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) for Google LLC. Colin Kass (Proskauer Rose LLP) for SerpApi, LLC.

Companies: Google LLC; SerpApi, LLC

Cases: Copyright TechnologyInternet CaliforniaNews