Anti-Circumvention Laws Raise the Cost of Knowledge

Reddit's lawsuit against SerpAPI and Perplexity threatens to do exactly that. Reddit was once a very open platform, fostering a community of alternative apps and extensions putting users in control of their experience. Since the rise of AI however, it changed tack. Over the last three years Reddit has closed APIs to users, limited UI features, and otherwise restrained access without login.

By making the voices on the platform harder to access, the company has positioned itself as a gatekeeper, and has since struck a lucrative data-sharing arrangement with Google. SerpAPI, in contrast, is a tool which offers automated access to Google's search engine results pages. It's used by Perplexity, an AI-based search tool.

Legal arguments

Reddit sued to stop SerpAPI and Perplexity from bypassing Reddit's own arrangement with Google. The legal weapon Reddit employed is Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the same "anti-circumvention" law that has caused trouble for artists, innovators, and researchers over the years.

There are major problems with this argument. First, Reddit doesn't own the copyright in its users' posts—the users do, and they grant Reddit the right to distribute the posted content freely.

Second, there's no meaningful copyright infringement going on here. Perplexity functions like a search engine, responding to users' queries with relevant links and optionally an AI-generated summary. Crawling and indexing the web to create a search engine was long ago ruled a fair use under copyright law.

And third, Google's efforts to put rate limits on search queries and block some kinds of automated querying aren't the sort of "access controls" that Section 1201 was written for. The law was passed in 1998 and targeted things like breaking the encryption on DVDs and other digital media.

Broader implications

Unfortunately, a federal district judge ruled in July that the suit could proceed, concluding that Section 1201 applied. That's a dangerous ruling, because it casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over lots of important research, including efforts to study public sentiment through social media and to preserve records of historical events.

Without tools that can look at the web at scale, many kinds of research are simply impossible today. But if employing those tools risks Section 1201 liability, only the wealthiest institutions will be able to use them.

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. If our knowledge of the online world comes only through wealthy institutions, the cost of knowledge will only increase and access to unbiased answers diminishes.