In July, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpApi. Google has now filed an amended complaint, and today we asked the court to dismiss that one as well. I want to explain what changed, what didn’t, and why we’re still confident.

It’s worth comparing Google’s amended complaint to the original. (You can see the redline at the bottom of this post.) The original complaint swept in Google Shopping and Google Maps. Those theories are gone. What’s left is a narrower claim about licensed content appearing in search results, principally images in Knowledge Panels. We’re confident in our response to this much narrower set of claims.

Google added a set of allegations about permission—that its content licensors authorized it, and in some cases even asked it, to deploy access controls. It points to four sources: two unnamed licensing agreements, its agreement with Reddit, and its own privacy policy. Google has not filed any of those agreements with the court, and it does not quote a single operative word from them. It describes what it believes they mean and asks the court to accept that description as fact. But contract interpretation starts with the text, and not one of the four is alleged to say anything at all about anti-bot technology, automated access, or SearchGuard. A privacy policy, in particular, is not a copyright license—it is a notice about the data a company collects about you, and it does not mention copyright at all.

There is a smaller detail worth noting. The only specific content Google identifies in its entire amended complaint is two photographs: one of Babe Ruth taken in 1921, and one of Willie Mays taken in 1951. As we explain in our motion, the first is clearly in the public domain, and the second is no longer covered by copyright.

What has not changed is what SerpApi does, which we have described publicly since long before Google brought this lawsuit. SerpApi provides programmatic access to search results that are publicly visible to anyone using a standard web browser. We do not bypass authentication. We do not access private accounts. We do not retrieve non-public data. We do not claim ownership of the underlying content, and every piece of it remains available on the public websites it came from. All of this was documented on our website before Google sued us and it remains on our website now, visible to our customers and the public.

The legal question in this case has always been narrow, and it has not changed with Google’s amended complaint. The DMCA protects technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Google is a website operator, not the copyright holder of what it surfaces, and the statute defines circumvention in specific terms—descrambling, decrypting, or otherwise avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing a measure. Reading a page that is open to every browser on earth is not on that list.

For our customers: nothing about your service changes. Our APIs, our coverage, and our U.S. Legal Shield are exactly as they were.

As we have with every filing in this case, we are publishing the motion below, along with a comparison showing exactly what Google changed between its two complaints. We encourage you to read the documents and draw your own conclusions.

Questions? Contact press@serpapi.com.