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.
Anna’s Archive, which bills itself as “the world’s largest shadow library,” did not respond to the lawsuit and doesn’t seem likely to comply with the judgment. The shadow library creator has written that “we deliberately violate the copyright law in most countries. This allows us to do something that legal entities cannot do: making sure books are mirrored far and wide.”
But the court order has value for OCLC, which said in a November 2025 motion that it “hopes to take the judgment to website hosting services so that OCLC’s WorldCat data will be removed from Anna’s Archive’s websites.” We contacted OCLC about its plans today and will update this article if it provides any information.