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Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

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Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#21

> Defendant SerpApi, LLC (“SerpApi”) offers services that “scrape” this copyrighted content and more from Google, using deceptive means to automatically access and take it for free at an astonishing scale and then offering it to various customers for a fee. In doing so, SerpApi acquires for itself the valuable product of Google’s labors and investment in the content, and denies Google’s partners compensation for thei…

No, Google doesn't use deceptive means. They identify their crawler as GoogleBot, and obey robots.txt.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#22
This is why I stopped using google wherever possible - they pushed the frontier of useful fair use and copyright precedents and established that things on the public internet displayed to the public without a login mechanism are fair game for scraping. The US supreme court ruled that you have to incorporate authentication and not simply serve your content to the public internet if you want to restrict usage.

Then they bend over backwards and do the "but not like that!" crap with their legal team and swing their wealth and influence around to screw over other companies and people, and a vast majority of it just vanishes, gets memory holed, with NDAs and out of court settlements, so you never get to see the full scope of harm they inflict unless you're watching like a hawk and catch the headlines before they get disappeared.

Google needs to be broken up and we need to legislate the dismantling of the current adtech regime, with a privacy and sovereignty respecting digital bill of rights that puts the interests of individual citizens above that of giant corporate blobs and the mass surveillance data industry.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#23
post #16

What’s the difference between scraping and malicious scraping? Does google engage in scraping or malicious scraping? Do the AI companies engage in scraping or malicious scraping?

Note that I am not defending the merits of Google's lawsuit, but they did describe in this very post what they believe distinguishes their scraping versus SerpApi. > Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing n…

>bombarding websites with massive networks of bots

Like GoogleBot?

And yeah, robots.txt is not enforced by any law.

I think this is just about dragging SerpApi through a lengthy legal procedure and fees.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#26
post #7
post #3

I'm not sure of the legality but I definitely appreciate their product. This lawsuit seems odd because google themselves scrape content for their indexes. From what I see SerpApi is really just providing a machine interface that Google themselves refuses to provide users and visibility into SERPs which is also something that users should have available to them. I'm probably just being naive though...

Google publishes how to control their bot - with robots.txt. They then obey those instructions. Google also takes some effort to not use all your bandwidth. Google isn't perfect, but they are at least making a "good faith" effort to be nice and this does count in court. Overall most will agree that in general what google does to allow people to find their website is worth the things that google is doing. You can of c…

What's nice about scraping all the content for their own good while killing off websites left and right? Google needs to be sued also.

Along with all the other AI companies out there, the've committed the biggest theft in human history.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#27
post #21

> Defendant SerpApi, LLC (“SerpApi”) offers services that “scrape” this copyrighted content and more from Google, using deceptive means to automatically access and take it for free at an astonishing scale and then offering it to various customers for a fee. In doing so, SerpApi acquires for itself the valuable product of Google’s labors and investment in the content, and denies Google’s partners compensation for thei…

No, Google doesn't use deceptive means. They identify their crawler as GoogleBot, and obey robots.txt.

Google doesn't have to do that now after already having established its own monopoly... just like SerpApi wouldn't have to act deceptively if they had a monopoly on search.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#28
post #21

> Defendant SerpApi, LLC (“SerpApi”) offers services that “scrape” this copyrighted content and more from Google, using deceptive means to automatically access and take it for free at an astonishing scale and then offering it to various customers for a fee. In doing so, SerpApi acquires for itself the valuable product of Google’s labors and investment in the content, and denies Google’s partners compensation for thei…

No, Google doesn't use deceptive means. They identify their crawler as GoogleBot, and obey robots.txt.

What about for their LLM products? We know that OpenAi does not respect the robots.txt file

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#29
post #8
post #2

> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others They have a different definition of "licensing" than most people I guess. Aren't site operators complaining about Google using this "licensed" content in AI overviews... not to mention the scraping for AI model training. The pot is calling the kettle black.

As far as I know, Google respects robots.txt and doesn't obfuscate their crawlers, so you can easily block them if you want. It seems like an important distinction?

Google can afford to respect robots.txt because it has a monopoly on search and nobody would consider actually blocking them in said robots.txt anyway.

SerpApi doesn't have that privilege.

Re: Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping

#30
post #21

> Defendant SerpApi, LLC (“SerpApi”) offers services that “scrape” this copyrighted content and more from Google, using deceptive means to automatically access and take it for free at an astonishing scale and then offering it to various customers for a fee. In doing so, SerpApi acquires for itself the valuable product of Google’s labors and investment in the content, and denies Google’s partners compensation for thei…

No, Google doesn't use deceptive means. They identify their crawler as GoogleBot, and obey robots.txt.

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