Reddit's Scraping Case Against Perplexity Survived Dismissal. Nothing Has Been Decided.

Reddit's lawsuit against Perplexity cleared its first procedural hurdle on Friday. Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, in the Southern District of New York, largely denied the defendants' motions to dismiss.

What survived and what did not

The core of Reddit's case — its DMCA section 1201 anti-circumvention claims, which allege that the defendants got around technical measures protecting the site — proceeds to discovery. Perplexity did not lose outright. The section 1201(b) trafficking claim against SerpApi was dismissed, and so were Reddit's unfair competition and unjust enrichment claims against both defendants.

What a motion to dismiss decides

Almost nothing. At this stage a court assumes the plaintiff's allegations are true and asks only whether they would state a claim if proved. Denying the motion means the case is plausible enough to continue. It is not a finding that Perplexity did anything, and it is emphatically not a ruling that scraping is illegal. Headlines to that effect are describing a decision that has not been made.

The theory is the interesting part

Reddit is not leading with copyright. Section 1201 is about circumventing technical protection measures, which shifts the question from whether the content was copyable to whether the defendants got around the locks on it. That framing, if it holds up through discovery, would apply to a great deal of AI training and retrieval activity that copyright arguments have struggled to reach.

One correction worth making

Reddit's stock fell about 22% the same day. That was its quarterly results and its guidance on referral traffic from Google's AI search — not this ruling. Several outlets have braided the two.

What discovery actually opens up

The stage the case now enters is the one defendants dislike most. Discovery means Reddit can demand internal documents about how the content was obtained — which requests were made, what was done about rate limits and blocks, and what SerpApi, a search-results API, supplied and to whom. Those are questions no AI search company has had to answer on the record. Whatever the case is eventually worth, the process itself produces material that does not currently exist in public.