When shadow library Anna's Archive lost its .org domain in early January, the controversial site's operator said the suspension didn't appear to have anything to do with its recent mass scraping of Spotify.

But it turns out, probably not surprisingly to most people, that the domain suspension resulted from a lawsuit filed by Spotify, along with major record labels Sony, Warner, and Universal Music Group (UMG). The music companies sued Anna's Archive in late December in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the case was initially sealed.

A judge ordered the case unsealed on January 16 "because the purpose for which sealing was ordered has been fulfilled." Numerous documents were made public on the court docket yesterday, and they explain events around the domain suspension.

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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.

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The primary domain of Shadow library Anna's Archive was taken offline, with annas-archive.org being put under the serverHold status. While Anna's Archive recently made waves with a massive "backup" of Spotify, the shadow library's operator said the music pirating doesn't appear to be connected to the .org domain suspension. Anna's Archive remains available at several other domains.

Anna's Archive launched in 2022 in response to the US Department of Justice seizure of domains used by e-book pirate site Z-Library. Acting as a shadow library and a search engine for other shadow libraries, Anna's Archive aims to archive books and other written materials and make them widely available via torrents. Its data sets have also been heavily used by AI companies to train large language models.

In addition to mirroring shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and Z-Library, Anna's Archive made a major move into music pirating two weeks ago with an announcement that it scraped Spotify and made a 300TB copy of the most streamed songs. Despite that development, the person behind Anna's Archive said the domain suspension doesn't seem to be related to the Spotify scraping.

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