SDNY
COURTHOUSE, Oct 1 – In the
lawsuit by Reddit against SerpApi, Perplexity and
Oxylabs, SDNY Judge Paul E. Engelmayer on October 1 held
an hourlong conference largely about discovery and
antitrust issues. Inner City Press went to cover it in
person, even as one of Reddit's lawyers was apparently
invited to call in (he ended up not getting in, his
colleague said).
While
discovery will proceed into Reddit's agreement with
Google and how Perplexity scrapes - its lawyer argued
that's irrelevant - discovery into the antitrust claims
is not stayed.
Oxylabs,
which tried arguments ranging from EU GDPR to
limitations on the reach of the DMCA, was told by Judge
Engelmayer that he is unlikely to grant their motion to
dismiss.
He set
two far-out dates: April 5, 2027 at 2:30 pm, and October
27 at 2:30 pm. He noted that this would be harder to
settle that backward looking case like car crashes and
employment litigation, and offered the services of a
Magistrate.
Previously:
Reddit,
Inc. filed suit in the Southern District of New York on
October 22, 2025, accusing SerpApi LLC, along with
Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI, Inc., of
industrial-scale scraping of Reddit content via Google's
search results and selling it commercially to train AI
systems, chiefly Perplexity's. The complaint alleges the
defendants circumvented both Reddit's own anti-scraping
defenses and Google's "SearchGuard" technological
protection measures by disguising automated bot traffic
as human users, violating the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, and
separately alleges trespass, unjust enrichment, and
civil conspiracy. It is Reddit's second such suit
against the AI data-scraping ecosystem, following its
June 2025 case against Anthropic PBC in California,
alleging similar unauthorized scraping of Reddit content
to train Claude. On
July 31, 2026, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer largely denied
the defendants' motions to dismiss, allowing most of
Reddit's DMCA and civil conspiracy claims to proceed
while trimming one DMCA theory and the state-law unjust
enrichment and unfair competition claims. The court
found Reddit's allegations — that SerpApi's system
deploys "a server-swarm to hide from, avoid, or simply
overwhelm by brute force" Reddit's and Google's
technological protections, and that Perplexity's role
went "more than a bystander" by setting parameters for
the scraping activity — sufficient to proceed to
discovery.