A federal judge in New York has declined to dismiss the core of Reddit's copyright case against Perplexity AI, allowing key claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to move forward against both Perplexity and the web-scraping platform SerpAPI.

The dispute centers on how AI-powered search engines harvest user-generated content, and the ruling is expected to set a significant precedent on whether anti-circumvention law can be applied to companies that scrape content to generate AI-driven answers. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, codified in Section 1201, have historically been applied to digital rights management tools protecting media like films and software; extending them to IP-rotation tactics used in web scraping would chart new legal territory.

Reddit's Claims Against Perplexity and SerpAPI

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmeyer refused to dismiss Reddit's DMCA claims against Perplexity and SerpAPI. The DMCA prohibits bypassing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Reddit alleges that Perplexity and SerpAPI circumvented these protections by continually rotating their IP addresses to evade safeguards maintained by Reddit and Google, enabling them to harvest user posts on a massive scale.

Judge Engelmeyer described Reddit's platform as precisely the type of "global digital online marketplace for copyrighted works" that the DMCA was enacted to protect. He also preliminarily accepted that Google's SearchGuard qualifies as a "technological measure" controlling access to protected material.

However, the judge did dismiss a "trafficking" claim against SerpAPI, as well as Reddit's state-law claims for unfair competition and unjust enrichment against both defendants. The case will now proceed to discovery, where Reddit's allegations will be tested against evidence of how Perplexity and SerpAPI actually collected the posts in question — a phase that could surface internal documentation about the companies' data-acquisition practices. (Reuters, MLex)

Broader Wave of Litigation Against Perplexity

Reddit, which filed its lawsuit in October 2025, is not alone in taking legal action against Perplexity. The New York Times, Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal), the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, and Encyclopedia Britannica have all filed similar suits accusing the company of using copyrighted material without permission or compensation. The wave of litigation mirrors a broader legal reckognition across the AI industry, with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Stability AI also defending copyright suits from authors, visual artists, and news organizations over training data.

Reddit has stated that its lawsuit aims to protect its content licensing model. The platform has already reached licensing agreements with companies including Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and OpenAI for AI training purposes. Reddit argues that Perplexity's unauthorized data collection undermines these agreements and damages its commercial interests.

Perplexity maintains that it operates within existing legal frameworks. A lawyer for SerpAPI argued that the company "accesses public search results, not Reddit's platform," adding that "public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it."

Perplexity has likened the lawsuits to historical publisher reactions to new technologies, from radio to television to the internet. The company's head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, said: "Fortunately, it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."

Mounting Regulatory Pressure

Adding to Perplexity's legal challenges, Germany's ZAK media regulator recently classified both Perplexity AI and Google's AI Overviews as content providers under German media law, stripping away a liability shield the companies had previously relied on. (Cryptopolitan)

Perplexity, valued at approximately $20 billion, faces simultaneous legal pressure from multiple fronts. Publishers including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Japan's Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and Encyclopedia Britannica have all initiated litigation against the startup over copyrighted material.