Shadow Libraries - Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, and more

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TorrentFreak: Anna’s Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight (A)
Anna’s Archive is generally known as a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, helping users find pirated books and other related resources.
However, last December, the site announced that it had also backed up Spotify, which came as a shock to the music industry.
Anna’s Archive initially released only Spotify metadata, and no actual music, but that put the music industry on high alert. Together with the likes of Universal, Warner, and Sony, Spotify filed a lawsuit days later, hoping to shut the site down.
Through a preliminary injunction targeting domain registrars and registries, the shadow library lost several domain names. However, not all were taken down, and the site registered various new domain names as backups.
The legal pressure also appeared to pay off in other ways. Not long after the lawsuit was filed, the shadow library removed the Spotify listing for their torrents page. The same applies to the first batch of music files that was accidentally released in February.
The site’s operator, Anna’s Archivist, hoped that these removals would motivate the music industry to back down, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they returned to court requesting a $322 million default judgment after the defendant failed to show up in court.

$322 Million, Granted in Full​

Yesterday, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment against the site’s unknown operators, awarding Spotify and the major labels the requested $322 million damages award in full.
Default judgment
default judgment

The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million.
The plaintiff previously described their damages request as “extremely conservative.” The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion.
Plaintiff(s)Damages SoughtAmount
WarnerStatutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 48 sound recordings$7,200,000.00
SonyStatutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 50 sound recordings$7,500,000.00
UMGStatutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 50 sound recordings$7,500,000.00
SpotifyStatutory damages for circumvention of a technological measure (17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3)(A)) at $2,500 for 120,000 music files$300,000,000.00
Total$322,200,000.00
Anna’s Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.
Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain.
For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction.

Permanent Injunction Targets Domains​

In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg.
Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site’s operators.
Domain names
domain names

The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc.
Anna’s Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site’s operators remains unknown.

A Way Out, at a Price​

In theory, Anna’s Archive has the option to prevent the domain suspension. The permanent injunction allows the site to seek relief from this measure, after showing that it has paid the full $322 million damages award and complied with all injunctive obligations.
That’s an unlikely option, to say the least. At the same time, however, it is not guaranteed that the site’s domain names will be suspended.
As reported previously, several domain names, including the Greenland-based .gl version, are linked to registries and registrars outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. court. As such, they previously did not comply to the preliminary injunction, and it is unknown whether the latest order changes that.
—
A copy of the default judgment entered by Judge Rakoff is available here (pdf).
Unsurprising news, I suppose with the exception of their insane request for domain suspension towards hosting providers very clearly not based in the US. The UK aren't allowed to hold Americans by the balls with the retarded Ofcom shit but when its the RIAA doing it, I guess its fine? 🤔
That being said this was all still retarded for Anna's Archive to do. Was entirely outside of their scope, and they never even meaningfully distributed or monetized the pirated files. All it resulted in was a lawsuit and Spotify lobotomizing their API like a bunch of faggots. Basically a waste of everyone's time.
 
Tremolo said:
Unsurprising news, I suppose with the exception of their insane request for domain suspension towards hosting providers very clearly not based in the US. The UK aren't allowed to hold Americans by the balls with the retarded Ofcom shit but when its the RIAA doing it, I guess its fine? 🤔
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Obama transferred ICANN to the UN. We aren't in charge of our own domain name system anymore. Thanks Obama!
 
Lolek said:
  • He was the co-owner of Reddit.
  • He was a leftist activist literally helping other leftists teke over the political system.
If all copyright fighters have to be such faggots, I prefer to have none.
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Same thing with why all people who graduate Harvard are communists and why is every Yale alum involved in the insurance industry?
 
TorrentFreak: NVIDIA’s Shadow Library Scripts ‘Have No Other Purpose’ Than Infringement, Judge Rules (archive)

TorrentFreak: Publishers Seek $19.5 Million and Domain Takedown Order Against Anna’s Archive (archive)

TorrentFreak: Anna’s Archive Hit With $19.5m Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order (archive)

TorrentFreak: Z-Library Lets People Run White-Label, Login-Only Pirate Mirrors (archive)

TorrentFreak: Major Publishers Sue ‘WeLib’, a Pirate Site Built on Anna’s Archive Code (archive)

TorrentFreak: Anna’s Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It’s Still Online (archive)
When Anna's Archive suffered widespread downtime earlier this month, many users feared a legal crackdown. Instead, the site was reportedly targeted by a coordinated assault on its network infrastructure. Just as it did after facing $340 million in damages and losing several domains earlier this year, the Archive quickly bounced back.
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After the site came back online, the official AnnaArchivist account attributed it to a coordinated attack by an unnamed party.

“Apologies for the issues. We suspect a coordinated attack. We’ve mitigated the attack vectors…” the message read, while noting that memberships already include one to two extra days per month to account for downtime.
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
When Anna's Archive suffered widespread downtime earlier this month, many users feared a legal crackdown. Instead, the site was reportedly targeted by a coordinated assault on its network infrastructure. Just as it did after facing $340 million in damages and losing several domains earlier this year, the Archive quickly bounced back.
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Copyright cartel faggots must all fucking hang.
 
Anna's Archive Blog: AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late (archive) (ghost) (mega) (wayback)
annas-archive.gl/blog, 2026-08-05

A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese).

TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022.

Anthropic’s “Project Panama” was exposed in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement. In early 2024, they launched this highly confidential project. The company has spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing millions of paper books, scanning them, training its Claude LLM, and then destroying them all. It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

So why destroy physical books? Behind it lies the AI race and the interests of capital:
  1. It prevents these books from being scanned and used for training by competitors.
  2. It avoids legal risks.
  3. Destroying books is cheaper than lossless scanning.
After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

This battle for old books reveals a paradox: while promising to “make human knowledge accessible,” AI companies are dismantling the most solid carriers of human knowledge. The public may gain more intelligent AI assistants, but at the cost of a vast amount of knowledge resources disappearing from the public domain.

Shadow libraries​

As the world’s largest shadow library, Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies. After all, the emergence of shadow libraries is the greatest miracle of knowledge sharing in the 21st century. Along with other shadow libraries, we’re building a digital library of Alexandria, an inextinguishable light of humanity.

We need the help of volunteers worldwide to scan materials (including books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, ancient books, rare books, and other materials) from every library and archive around the world and upload them to the shadow library for knowledge preservation, especially those that are easily lost. If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth.
  • For small scans and uploads, we usually award recognition and lifetime membership to Anna’s Archive.
  • For large-scale scans and uploads of books, we can help pay for the scanning fees and other rewards.

Time is running out​

Since the beginning of 2025, AI-generated content has accounted for more than half of newly published internet content. A frightening reality emerges: if much of the future content consists of AI-generated books and papers, will humans be able to distinguish them? Once AI has absorbed even the last sentence written by humans on paper, all that will remain on the internet will be AI’s own words. In such a world, how can human civilization be preserved?

Shadow libraries offer the best answer. If you want the memory of human civilization to no longer be monopolized, if you want future generations to be able to read all of humanity’s wealth for free, if you don’t want publishers making a fortune while authors receive little, then please help us. Please make any contribution you can, whether it’s scanning and uploading books, purchasing books and papers to scan and upload, or donating. With the efforts of all humanity, the monopoly on knowledge will be broken. Each of us can make history.

This is a race against time. Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers.

- Anna’s Archive volunteer “u”

Relevant tickets for more information: #223 #187
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TorrentFreak: Publishers Seek $19.5m From Pirate Library WeLib, Recycle Anna’s Archive Claims (archive) (ghost) (mega)
A group of major publishers has asked a New York federal court to issue a $19.5 million default judgment against pirate library WeLib. The site allegedly copied its code and most of its collection from Anna's Archive, which lost a nearly identical case in May. Ironically, the publishers' brief appears to 'copy' from Anna's Archive as well, or at least from their own lawsuit against the shadow library.
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
TorrentFreak: Publishers Seek $19.5m From Pirate Library WeLib, Recycle Anna’s Archive Claims (archive) (ghost) (mega)
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What a strange "argument" to try to make, as if a specific phrasing of a legal claim can only ever be used once (even if it was previously successful) and that using it again is somehow dishonest, lazy or unethical (even if the "facts" of the case are identical except for the name(s) of the accused party/parties). Nah, dog, two people can literally do the same exact thing and it can still be "legally wrong" in the same exact way, where the exact same word-for-word arguments can still be applied. Courts don't score "bonus points" for "originality." In fact they're quite happy with boilerplate when it's factually correct and relevant to a case because it makes it easier to review and reason about.

I know it's fun for them to point out hypocrisy but this is a seriously weak fucking stretch. Not the "gotcha" they were hoping for.
 
The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Yeah, it's a clone of Anna's Archive. For those who haven't heard of it, here is the WeLib mention on the Anna's Archive FAQ:
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I wonder how much it stings the content cartel that they're "accidentally" helping protect those dang dirty pirates from a bit of fraud here by going after Anna's Archive impostors that steal donations. :story:
 
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