Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss

i wonder what the implications are with linkedin which uses similar argument for its walled garden

They are also a google workspace user. Wonder how they feel about google as a company.

Reading the motion, it's less "Google has no case" and moreso "Google needs to prove they told the copyright owners in the Knowledge Graph they'd be putting DRM on the search results in order for it to be legally DRM". I don't think that's a particularly high barrier to clear and seems to be moreso Google's typical Risk Maoism[0] making them not clearly state things in legally obvious ways. I would not be surprised if Google just forgot to get legal authorization to put DRM on these results.

Once they fix that part of the complaint, however, I don't see SerpApi prevailing in court or in the marketplace. Copyright owners are under no obligation to dutifully separate out the uncopyrightable elements of their work to assist copyists; that's why you can put trap streets on a map in order to make it copyrightable. And it would be harder[1] to argue "Well we break DRM, but we dutifully filter out the copyrighted portion", especially when Google could just license some copyrighted work to inject into the blue links in a way you couldn't tell, but would be legally relevant.

SerpApi probably can escape prosecution for this specific lawsuit, but Google can just engineer a more legally airtight case and get 'em that way.

[0] The tendency for risk departments in large corporations to independently reinvent Maoist police states

[1] Though, not impossible: Corellium did something similar by arguing that them cloud-hosting emulated iOS instances narrowed the scope of the DMCA to the point where the security research exception actually applied