‘Free’ eBooks Search Engine Anna’s Archive Faces Permanent Injunction and Damages

• A lawsuit filed by OCLC demands monetary damages and a permanent injunction for the popular pirate library search engine Anna's Archive.
• The lawsuit stemmed from Anna's Archive scraping and publishing online OCLC’s WorldCat database.
• Anna's Archive did not answer but recently switched to a new domain name.

Anna’s Archive, a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, is facing damages and a permanent injunction after its operators failed to respond to OCLC's lawsuit at an Ohio Federal Court. The current motion doesn’t include a U.S. blockade for Anna’s Archive.

The site’s operators managed to scrape 2.2 terabytes from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database and published 700 million records for free last year.

The American nonprofit cooperative organization says that it “suffered considerable harm” and spent over $2 million on upgrades for its hardware infrastructure and a Cloudflare contract as a result of the Anna’s Archive alleged massive hacking operation. Yet, data was still lost through torrents.

OCLC says the organization sustained losses on full-time employee salaries, security, hardware, and various other investigations, bringing total damages to over $5 million, and that ongoing harm as a direct result of Anna’s Archive’s cyberattacks cannot be remedied by compensation.

The motion mentions that Anna’s Archive is banned in Italy and the Netherlands for violating copyright laws, and publishers prioritize shutting down Anna’s Archive. 

The original complaint sought an order for Anna’s Archive to stop scraping WorldCat data. However, OCLC added that the organization wants all previously scraped data, including all the available torrents, to stop circulating illegally and be destroyed in full.

In early July, Anna’s Archive pirate activities moved to a .gs domain from its original .org domain, as the latter falls under U.S. jurisdiction since it is managed by the Public Interest Registry with Tucows as the registrar.