Lawsuit Accuses Anna’s Archive of Hacking WorldCat, Stealing 2.2 TB Data
An Anonymous Coward writes:
American nonprofit OCLC is known globally for its leading database of bibliographic records, WorldCat. A few months ago, many of these records were posted publicly by the shadow library search engine, Anna's Archive. OCLC believes that this is the result of a year-long hack and, with a lawsuit filed at an Ohio federal court, it demands damages.
Anna's Archive is a meta-search engine for book piracy sources and shadow libraries.
Launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, its self-stated goal is to ensure and facilitate the availability of books and articles to the broader public.
A few months ago, the search engine expanded its offering by making available data from OCLC's proprietary WorldCat database. Anna's Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.
These records contain no copyrighted books or articles. However, they can help to create a to-do list of all missing shadow library content on the web, with the ultimate goal of making as much content publicly available as possible.
[...] It is no secret that publishers fiercely oppose the search engine's stated goals. The same also applies to OCLC, which has now elevated its concerns into a full-blown lawsuit, filed this month at a federal court in Ohio.
The complaint accuses Washington citizen Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo and several "John Does" of operating the search engine and scraping WorldCat data. The scraping is equated to a cyberattack by OCLC and started around the time Anna's Archive launched.
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