Online content hubs like Reddit Inc. have a freshly validated path for combating AI companies that harvest copyrighted content without a license.

Traditional copyright and other avenues likely preclude such companies from enforcing rights to property they don’t own. But it’s becoming more apparent that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s provision against circumventing technological protection measures—which allows “any person injured” to sue over a violation—can be a powerful means of avoiding that pitfall.

Reddit recently defeated a dismissal bid by Perplexity AI Inc. and SerpApi LLC based in part on that broad language.

The court’s reasoning only extends to claims that turn on scrapers jumping a fence restricting access rather than meatier questions of whether AI companies’ reliance on copyrighted works is fair use. But using the DMCA to eliminate consideration of those tricky issues in some ways simplifies the path to establishing liability, IP attorneys say.

Agatha Liu of Duane Morris said the decision stood on sold ground, including that Reddit’s revenue-generating and user-privacy-ensuring licensing agreements with Google highlighted plausible harm from the scraping.

“The court’s ruling here is, in a way, saying ‘no matter how complex the technology gets, or how many layers it involves, if your intention is to scrape copyrighted content for non-fair use you may be in trouble,'” Liu said. “It makes sense. Somebody has to be able to bring this case.”

A federal judge in California reached a different conclusion, denying Google LLC standing against scrapers in a similar case, she said. But whereas Engelmayer found the scraped Reddit material plausibly copyright-protected, the Google search results at issue in that case weren’t, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said.

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