Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply
The operator of WorldCat won a default judgment against Anna's Archive, with a federal judge ruling yesterday that the shadow library must delete all copies of its WorldCat data and stop scraping, using, storing, or distributing the data.
Anna's Archive is a shadow library and search engine for other shadow libraries that was launched in 2022. It archives books and other written materials and makes them available via torrents, and recently expanded its ambitions by scraping Spotify to make a 300TB copy of the most-streamed songs. Anna's Archive lost its .org domain a couple of weeks ago but remains online at other domains.
Yesterday's ruling is in a case filed by OCLC, a nonprofit that operates the WorldCat library catalog on behalf of member libraries. OCLC alleged that Anna's Archive illegally hacked WorldCat.org" to steal 2.2TB of data.