Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet

Reddit’s lawsuit against data scraping companies and AI firm Perplexity represents a dangerous attempt to dismantle the open internet by misusing copyright law. The core issue is that Reddit is not suing for direct infringement of its own content, but rather alleging that third parties violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by bypassing Google’s access controls to retrieve publicly available information. This legal strategy attempts to claim ownership over search results that include Reddit content, despite Reddit holding no copyright over the original user-generated posts. The argument that accessing data through search engines constitutes "circumvention" is fundamentally flawed and sets a perilous precedent. By claiming that avoiding its own servers to fetch information from public search indexes is illegal, Reddit seeks to control how information flows across the web. This interpretation would effectively grant platforms the power to dictate who can access public data and through which channels, undermining the interoperability and programmability that define an open web infrastructure. If successful, this lawsuit would allow entities to monetize public discourse by forcing search engines and AI tools to pay for linking to content rather than simply citing it. This threatens the foundational mechanics of search and information discovery, potentially closing off large portions of the web to those who cannot afford licensing fees. For the open data community, this case highlights the urgent need to protect against the enclosure of public information and the abuse of anti-circumvention laws to restrict data accessibility and innovation.

Source: techdirt.com
Published on 2025-10-25

Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet

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