Google’s last chance to keep fight alive
Although Rose agreed with SerpApi that, in granting the motion to dismiss, the court gave SerpApi a big win, the fight is not over yet, as Google has a narrow path forward to keep its war against web scraping alive.
Google acknowledged that search results can’t be copyrighted but argued that “knowledge panels” sometimes include copyrighted content that Google licenses from rights holders. If Google can amend its complaint to argue that rights holders directly authorized Google to use its anti-scraping technology to prevent unauthorized access to content, then Google may be able to block a very limited amount of SerpApi’s scraping.
Google’s spokesperson, José Castañeda, told Ars that Google plans to amend the complaint and is “pleased to see that the Court rejected nearly all of SerpApi’s legal arguments” otherwise attempting to dispute Google’s standing.
“We look forward to filing an amended complaint, as the Court invited us to do, and we remain committed to protecting our services and partners from unauthorized access,” Castañeda said.
However, Rose told Ars that Google has somewhat “talked themselves into a little bit of a corner here, both in this litigation and historically.”
For Google, it could be “very dangerous” to argue that the knowledge panel is “chock full of copyrighted material,” Rose suggested. Since the search giant doesn’t license all the content in the knowledge box, Google could risk future lawsuits if the act of algorithmically creating the knowledge box without licenses suddenly becomes viewed as infringement, Rose said.
“They have to make an argument somehow that there are parts of that that are reproductions of copyrighted material, but the only parts that are reproductions of copyrighted material are the ones they’ve explicitly licensed,” Rose suggested. “Otherwise, they’re admitting that they have been reproducing stuff without licensing it, and that gets them into another fair use fight that they probably don’t want to have.”