I'm not sure of the legality but I definitely appreciate their product. This lawsuit seems odd because google themselves scrape content for their indexes. From what I see SerpApi is really just providing a machine interface that Google themselves refuses to provide users and visibility into SERPs which is also something that users should have available to them.

I'm probably just being naive though...

> Defendant SerpApi, LLC (“SerpApi”) offers services that “scrape” this copyrighted content and more from Google, using deceptive means to automatically access and take it for free at an astonishing scale and then offering it to various customers for a fee. In doing so, SerpApi acquires for itself the valuable product of Google’s labors and investment in the content, and denies Google’s partners compensation for their works

this has to be satire. Is Google not the #1 entity guilty of exactly this?

This is why I stopped using google wherever possible - they pushed the frontier of useful fair use and copyright precedents and established that things on the public internet displayed to the public without a login mechanism are fair game for scraping. The US supreme court ruled that you have to incorporate authentication and not simply serve your content to the public internet if you want to restrict usage.

Then they bend over backwards and do the "but not like that!" crap with their legal team and swing their wealth and influence around to screw over other companies and people, and a vast majority of it just vanishes, gets memory holed, with NDAs and out of court settlements, so you never get to see the full scope of harm they inflict unless you're watching like a hawk and catch the headlines before they get disappeared.

Google needs to be broken up and we need to legislate the dismantling of the current adtech regime, with a privacy and sovereignty respecting digital bill of rights that puts the interests of individual citizens above that of giant corporate blobs and the mass surveillance data industry.

From the filing

> SerpApi’s answer to SearchGuard is to mask the hundreds of millions of automated queries it is sending to Google each day to make them appear as if they are coming from human users. SerpApi’s founder recently described the process as “creating fake browsers using a multitude of IP addresses that Google sees as normal users.”

SerpApi wouldn't even be a thing if Google offered an equivalent API...

If google provided a useable reasonably priced API, then SerpApi wouldn't exist.

> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others

They have a different definition of "licensing" than most people I guess. Aren't site operators complaining about Google using this "licensed" content in AI overviews... not to mention the scraping for AI model training.

The pot is calling the kettle black.

What’s the difference between scraping and malicious scraping? Does google engage in scraping or malicious scraping? Do the AI companies engage in scraping or malicious scraping?

Google scrapes so what even is this? Beyond that I think it is unreasonable and monopolistic that Google can use all this data (like YouTube) to bolster their AI products but no one else can. It just means the megacorp will keep being megacorp and smaller players are doomed to have to work much harder and get very lucky. It’s not fair competition. So I view scraping Google as necessary for our society.

Related:

Reddit Accuses 'Data Scraper' Companies of Stealing Its Information

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45695433

Our Response to Reddit, Inc. vs. SerpApi, LLC: Defending the First Amendment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739889

Disgusting behavior by google. Scraping is google's whole business.

And then pretending that they're fighting for other people's copyright is just the cherry on top of the pile of hypocrisy.

yoink

* that's the sound of a ladder being yanked up

Google can eat a bag of dicks.

Their entire ai model was scraped.