GoKawiilA coalition of thirteen major publishers has won a massive $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna's Archive. A New York federal judge fully approved the publishers' requests, issuing a broad permanent injunction that orders more than twenty specific global registries, hosts, and service providers to immediately disable the site's remaining domains.
Earlier this month, a group of high-profile publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, asked a federal court in New York for a broad default judgment against Anna’s Archive.
The publishers argued that, in addition to sharing pirated books with the public, the shadow library is serving as a primary training data hub for AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA.
Because the site’s operators failed to show up in court to defend themselves, the publishers requested the court to rule in their favor.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff signed a default judgment granting the publishers exactly what they asked for. This includes a multi-million-dollar damages award and a far-reaching technical injunction to take out the site’s surviving domain names.
A $19.5 Million Paper Victory
At first glance, the damages award is the headline figure. Judge Rakoff granted the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 “Works in Suit”.
This brings the final damages bill amount to a staggering $19,500,000. However, as with the $322 million judgment won by the music industry against Anna’s Archive in the related Spotify case, it’s highly unlikely that this money will be recouped.
$19,500,000
For now, the operators of Anna’s Archive remain strictly anonymous, which doesn’t help either. The default judgment addresses this and requires the operators to unmask their identities and provide a sworn statement with valid contact information to the court within 10 days.
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