Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

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. Does this same reasoning insulate anyone who scrapes that content from the DMCA?