Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
This almost seems like a tautology, but I have to admit that it didn’t come to mind when I was reading about this case. I find myself wondering what the implications of this are for other non-copyrighted content, e.g., the output of LLMs. Does this same reasoning insulate anyone who scrapes that content from the DMCA?
- ▪This almost seems like a tautology, but I have to admit that it didn’t come to mind when I was reading about this case.
- ▪I find myself wondering what the implications of this are for other non-copyrighted content, e.g., the output of LLMs.
- ▪Does this same reasoning insulate anyone who scrapes that content from the DMCA?
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Techdirt |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techdirt.com/2026/07/27/judge-rejects-googles-attempt-to-dmca-its-way-out-of-being-scraped/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:15:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T19:16:57.232Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T19:16:57.232Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -gooGSBGFu1G · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Anonymous Coward says: July 27, 2026 at 11:57 am Thus, because the DMCA does not apply where the work controlled by a technological measure is not protected under the Copyright Act, Google’s claims under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2) are subject to dismissal as a matter of law to the extent that they are premised on instances where SearchGuard controls access to Google Search results that do not contain any copyrighted content. This almost seems like a tautology, but I have to admit that it didn’t come to mind when I was reading about this case. It should have, but it didn’t. I find myself wondering what the implications of this are for other non-copyrighted content, e.g., the output of LLMs.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Techdirt.
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