{
  "id": 16641961,
  "title": "Anti-Circumvention Laws Raise the Cost of Knowledge",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/26/anti-circumvention-laws-raise-the-cost-of-knowledge",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-26T17:20:40.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "EFF Deeplinks",
    "slug": "eff-deeplinks",
    "url": "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/anti-circumvention-laws-raise-cost-knowledge"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The cost of knowledge is being raised by anti-circumvention laws, according to the case of Reddit vs. SerpAPI and Perplexity. The open web, once a platform for alternative apps and extensions, has become increasingly restricted by Reddit. The company has closed APIs, limited UI features, and imposed stricter login requirements, effectively acting as a gatekeeper. This move has led to a lucrative data-sharing agreement with Google. SerpAPI, a tool designed to bypass Reddit's access controls, is now facing legal action from Reddit, which claims that SerpAPI's practices constitute \"circumventing\" access controls on copyrighted works. However, there are significant issues with this argument. Reddit does not own the copyright to its users' posts, and Perplexity's use of web crawling and indexing is considered a fair use under copyright law. Moreover, Google's own measures to regulate automated querying do not fall under the scope of Section 1201, which was originally designed to prevent the breaking of encryption on digital media. A federal district judge recently ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, casting a cloud of uncertainty over research that relies on tools like SerpAPI and Perplexity. This ruling threatens important research, including efforts to study public sentiment through social media and preserve historical records. The law's application to these tools could limit access to the internet for many researchers, as only wealthy institutions will be able to afford the legal risks. It is crucial that the internet remains open and accessible to all, with knowledge freely available rather than divided among a few gatekeepers.",
  "summary": "The vast amount of information on the open web requires researchers and journalists to adapt with new tools to make sense of it all. Checking facts, gauging public opinion, and other lines of inquiry depend on being able to analyze the overwhelming amount of material posted online every day. Unfortunately, responding to the AI industry’s voracious appetite for data, companies stewarding this…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}