Google has sued SerpApi in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the company of bypassing Google's security measures designed to prevent automated scraping of Search results and licensed content. The lawsuit aims to stop SerpApi’s bots from unlawfully scraping copyrighted content, violating the rights and choices of websites and content rightsholders.
Reasons for Legal Action
Google emphasizes that it follows industry-standard crawling protocols and respects websites' directives regarding content crawling. However, SerpApi allegedly ignores these rules by using deceptive tactics such as cloaking, deploying massive bot networks, and frequently changing crawler identities to circumvent security measures. This has led to a significant increase in unlawful scraping over the past year.
Nature of the Violation
SerpApi is accused of taking content that Google licenses from others—such as images in Knowledge Panels and real-time data in Search features—and reselling it for profit. This activity disregards the rights and directives of the original content providers.
Google's Response
Google invests substantial resources to protect websites’ content and combat abuse. When technical protections fail due to deliberate circumvention, Google resorts to legal action to stop such behavior and uphold content rights.
