The vast amount of information on the open web requires researchers and journalists to adapt with new tools to make sense of it all. Checking facts, gauging public opinion, and other lines of inquiry depend on being able to analyze the overwhelming amount of material posted online every day. Unfortunately, responding to the AI industry’s voracious appetite for data, companies stewarding this public data are looking to cash in and block access to the open web. This makes the web harder to navigate, and threatens all kinds of important research.
Reddit’s
lawsuit
against SerpAPI[1] and Perplexity threatens to do exactly that.
Reddit was once a very open platform, fostering a community of alternative apps and extensions putting users in control of their experience. Since the rise of AI however, it changed tack. Over the last three years Reddit has
closed APIs to users
, limited
UI features
, and otherwise restrained access
without login
. By making the voices on the platform harder to access, the company has positioned itself as a gatekeeper, and has since struck a lucrative data-sharing arrangement with Google.
SerpAPI, in contrast, is a tool which offers automated access to Google’s search engine results pages. It’s used by Perplexity, an AI-based search tool. Reddit sued to stop SerpAPI and Perplexity from bypassing Reddit’s own arrangement with Google. (Google brought a similar suit, which was dismissed by another court.)
It comes as little surprise that the legal weapon Reddit employed in this case is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the same “anti-circumvention” law that has caused so much trouble for artists, innovators, and researchers over the years—and that EFF has fought against from the beginning. Reddit’s suit claimed that SerpAPI’s use of widely used techniques to access Google search results amounted to “circumventing” access controls on copyrighted works.
There are major problems with this argument.
First, Reddit d
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