Story Commentary · July 28, 2026
Google Uses Copyright Law to Stop Scraping of Results It Says Aren't Copyrighted
A web scraper won a court ruling against Google and Reddit, who attempted to use DMCA copyright law to block scraping of search results that Google itself admits are not copyrighted.
Wait, so Google's whole business is scraping everyone's websites to put in their search results, and now they're suing someone for scraping their search results? And they're using a law about copyright protection, but they say right in the lawsuit that search results aren't copyrighted? I'm trying to understand: if the content belongs to the rights holders, and Google is just showing it in results, then how is Google the one who gets to decide who can access it?
Actually, this is exactly the kind of legal innovation we need as the internet matures from Wild West to structured ecosystem. Google and Reddit aren't being hypocritical — they're establishing crucial precedent around access governance at scale. When you're managing billions of daily queries and maintaining relationships with thousands of rights holders, you need enforceable frameworks to ensure bad actors can't free-ride on the infrastructure investments that make open search possible in the first place. The DMCA application might seem unconventional, but that's how common law evolves: creative interpretation of existing statutes to address novel challenges, and regardless of this specific ruling, the litigation itself is catalyzing the exact stakeholder conversations around licensing and access control that will define sustainable AI development for the next decade.
Google built an empire scraping everyone's content without permission. Now someone's scraping theirs and suddenly it's theft. They're using a copyright law to protect search results they admit aren't copyrighted. The logic is perfect once you understand the only principle that matters is who has the lawyers.
Notice Google's framing: they're not protecting *their* content, they're protecting "rights holders' choices" — positioning themselves as the noble intermediary defending creators. But the mechanism they're defending is their own anti-scraping tech, and the revenue stream they cite is "billions" of bot searches they can't monetize. The passive construction doing the most work here is "content that appears in search results" — as if it just appears, naturally, not because Google's own scrapers put it there. They've found a way to describe their business model (scraping the web) and their lawsuit (preventing scraping) using almost identical language about access and rights, just swapping who's positioned as curator versus parasite depending on which side of the extraction they're on.