EFF: Reddit's Lawsuit Could Raise the Cost of Web Research

Reddit is suing two companies over how they get Google search results. According to a publication by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), published October 26th, 2026, the lawsuit could make studying the open web harder and more expensive.

The defendants are SerpAPI and Perplexity. SerpAPI offers automated access to Google's search results pages, and the EFF says Perplexity, an AI search tool, uses it. Reddit sued to stop them from getting around its data-sharing arrangement with Google. Google brought a similar suit, which another court dismissed.

The EFF describes Reddit as once a very open platform. Over the last three years, it says, Reddit closed APIs to users, limited interface features, and restricted access without a login. We’ve also covered how Reddit plans to limit Old Reddit access to logged-in users who have used the site within the previous six months, and how RSS feed support will be discontinued in November.

Reddit's legal tool is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law was passed in 1998 and targeted things like breaking the encryption on DVDs. Reddit argues that SerpAPI's techniques amount to circumventing access controls on copyrighted works.

Why EFF Says the Argument Falls Short

The EFF raises three problems with Reddit's case.

1. First, Reddit doesn't own the copyright in its users' posts. The users do, and they give Reddit the right to distribute them.
2. Second, the EFF sees no meaningful copyright infringement. Perplexity works like a search engine, answering questions with links and, optionally, an AI summary. Courts ruled long ago that crawling and indexing the web to build a search engine is fair use.
3. Third, Google's rate limits and its blocking of some automated queries aren't the kind of access controls Section 1201 was written for. Reddit posts are visible to everyone, with no paywall and, generally, no login.

In July, a federal district judge ruled the lawsuit could go ahead, concluding that Section 1201 applied. The EFF calls that ruling dangerous.

What This Costs Everyone Else

The EFF says the ruling casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over research that depends on looking at the web at scale. That includes studying public opinion through social media and preserving records of historical events.

If using those tools carries legal risk, the EFF argues, only the wealthiest institutions will be able to afford them. I think that's the part worth worrying about. Most of us will never run a web crawler, but we rely on journalists, researchers, and archivists who do.

If they can't afford to check what's happening online, we're left trusting whoever can. The EFF puts it this way: "We cannot let the internet be rebuilt such that information is divided up among a handful of gatekeepers and sold back to us like cable subscription packages."

Although this particular case has nothing to do with VPNs, the instinct looks familiar to me. When governments try to impose new restrictions, like age verification, people have turned to VPNs. What did the governments do? Well, some, like the United Kingdom, who tried their best to ban VPNs.

We've reported on how VPN restrictions keep arriving alongside age verification laws, and on what a nationwide VPN ban would mean for security. In both, the response to people getting around a restriction is to go after the tool, not to ask whether the restriction is the problem.

Each of these fights looks narrow on its own. Together they shrink what ordinary people can see and do online. Pay attention to them, and speak up when the tools you depend on are the ones being targeted.