"Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world. Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."
The above was my take on the situation, too. If SerpStack is illegal, then Google is illegal.
If SerpStack has to cease to operate or pay damages, nearly everyone with a web server will be collecting a check from Google as they're being liquidated.
I think this blog post reflects our thinking.
Beyond SerpApi’s self-interest, we believe the threat to the open web is real.
"Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world. Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."
The above was my take on the situation, too. If SerpStack is illegal, then Google is illegal.
If SerpStack has to cease to operate or pay damages, nearly everyone with a web server will be collecting a check from Google as they're being liquidated.