SerpApi sued for ‘parasitic’ scraping & circumvention of protection measures

SerpApi sued for ‘parasitic’ scraping & circumvention of protection measures

Google reportedly argued that ‘SerpApi’s business model is parasitic’ and that it ‘appropriates the output of other services that have made substantial investments to generate it’

Google filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against SerpApi, LLC, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The suit hinges on claims that SerpApi, a ‘scraping’ service, illegally circumvents Google’s technological barriers to scrub copyrighted content from its search results pages on a massive scale, thereby benefitting from Google’s efforts sans compensation.

Google reportedly said that its search services are the product of “enormous investments of human and financial capital” and that it has developed ‘first-in-class methods’ for understanding what its users are looking for from the vastness of the World Wide Web through ‘decades of experimentation, enhancements and expenditures’. In its filing, Google detailed how it incorporates licensed copyrighted content into its search results for various services.

‘SerpApi’s business model is parasitic’ and ‘appropriates the output of other services that have made substantial investments to generate it’, Google argued. Google’s filing said that SerpApi provides its customers a ‘Google Search API’ which it publicises as a way to ‘scrape Google’. The filing further said that SerpApi uses automated means to scrape this content at an ‘astonishing scale’, then selling it to its customers. SerpApi’s automated requests have risen by ‘as much as 25,000’ over the last two years, now reaching hundreds of millions per day, Google’s filing stated.

Google developed and deployed a technological measure called Search Guard to stop this conduct however as soon as Search Guard (a product of tens of thousands of person hours and millions of dollars of investment) was implemented, SerpApi started working on ways to circumvent it, Google alleged. SerpApi disguises its automated queries to make them seem to come from human users, Google’s filing stated. It quoted SerpApi’s founder, Julien Khaleghy who described the process as ‘creating fake browsers using a multitude of IP addresses that Google sees as normal users’. The filing said that SerpApi’s ‘fakery takes many forms’. SerpApi may solve a Search Guard challenge with a ‘legitimate’ request and then syndicate the resulting authorization, sharing it with unauthorized machines around the world to enable its ‘fake browsers’ to generate automated queries that appear to Google as authorized. SerpApi also allegedly uses automated means to bypass CAPTCHAs, another facet of Search Guard that tests users to ensure they are humans rather than machines. The filing pointed to a recent blog post in which SerpApi boasted of circumventing Search Guard. SerpApi also promised that if Google implements new technological protection measures, SerpApi intends to bypass those as well.

Google’s filing states that SerpApi violates the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) which prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Google may elect to recover statutory damages of at least $200 and up to $2,500 for each of SerpApi’s many statutory violations.

Google’s filing further states that SerpApi violates 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) which prohibits trafficking in technology designed for circumvention.

SerpApi’s statutory violations have caused and will continue to cause harm to Google, the filing states. Google has asked the court for an order enjoining SerpApi from circumventing Google’s technological protection measures and from trafficking in any technology designed for that purpose. The filing also requests the destruction of any technology or products involved in the alleged violations. In addition, Google has sought to recover either statutory damages for each violation or its actual damages and SerpApi’s profits, along with costs and attorneys’ fees.