Why We're Taking Legal Action Against Serpapi's Unlawful Scraping

You can of course argue a lot of edge cases if you really want. For the most part I want to say "it isn't worth the argument". In some cases I will take your side if I really have to think about it, but in general the system google has been using mostly works and is mostly an acceptable compromise.

> Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing names — circumventing our security measures to take websites’ content wholesale. [...] SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others (like images that appear in Knowledge Panels, real-time data in Search features and much more), and then resells it for a fee. In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in Search.

To me this seems... interesting, for sure. I think that Google already set a bad precedent by pulling content from the web directly into its results, and an even worse one by paying websites with user-generated content for said content (while those sites didn't pay the users that actually made the user-generated content, as an additional bitchslap.)

But it seems like at the very least Google is suggesting that SerpApi is effectively trying to "steal" the work Google did, rather than do the same work themselves. Though I wonder if this is really Google pulling up the ladder behind them a bit, given how privileged of a position they are in with regards to web scraping.

It's a tough case. I think that something does need to ultimately be done about "malicious" web scraping that ignores robots.txt, but traditionally that sort of thing did not violate any laws, and I feel somewhat skeptical that it will be found to violate the law today. I mean, didn't LinkedIn try this same thing?