Manhattan judge strikes down Perplexity AI defense in Reddit copyright lawsuit

A federal judge in New York has refused to throw out the core of Reddit’s copyright case against Perplexity AI.

The fight is over how AI search engines harvest user posts and the ruling will set a precedent on whether anti-circumvention law can be used against companies that scrape content to feed AI answers.

What is Reddit accusing Perplexity and SerpAPI of?

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Englemeyer declined to dismiss Reddit’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against Perplexity and the web-scraping platform, SerpAPI. The act makes it illegal to bypass technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, which Reddit claims Perplexity and SerpAPI did using tricks like constantly changing their IP addresses to get around its and Google’s protections in order to grab user posts on a massive scale.

Judge Engelmayer said Reddit’s platform is exactly the kind of “global digital online marketplace for copyrighted works” that the DMCA was designed to protect. He also agreed, for now, that Google’s SearchGuard can count as a “technological measure” that controls access to protected work.

However, the judge dismissed a “trafficking” claim against SerpAPI, along with Reddit’s state-law claims for unfair competition and unjust enrichment against both defendants.

The case will now move into discovery, where Reddit’s claims will be tested against the actual evidence of how Perplexity and SerpAPI collected the posts.

Why are AI companies like Perplexity facing so many lawsuits?

Aside from Reddit, which Cryptopolitan reported filed its lawsuit in October 2025, The New York Times, Dow Jones (which publishes the Wall Street Journal), the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, and Encyclopedia Britannica have all filed similar lawsuits against Perplexity. They all accuse the company of using their copyrighted material without permission or payment.

Reddit has said its lawsuit is about protecting its licensing model as it has already made deals to license its content to companies like Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and OpenAI for AI training. Reddit argues that Perplexity’s actions undermine these agreements and hurt its business.

Perplexity’s current claim is that it works within the existing rules, while a lawyer for SerpAPI argued that the company “accesses public search results, not Reddit’s platform.” The lawyer added that “public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it.”

Perplexity has compared the lawsuits to how publishers have reacted to every new technology over the last century, from radio to TV to the internet. The company’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer said, “Fortunately, it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

Cryptopolitan reported earlier this month that Germany’s ZAK media regulator classified Perplexity AI and Google’s AI Overviews as content providers under German media law, removing a liability shield the companies had relied on.

Perplexity, which is valued at roughly $20 billion, now faces legal pressure on multiple fronts.

Publishers, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Japan’s Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and Encyclopedia Britannica, have all taken the startup to court over copyrighted material.