Anna’s Archive Hit With $19.5m Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order
A coalition of thirteen major publishers including Penguin Random House, Elsevier and HarperCollins has secured a $19.5 million default judgment against Anna's Archive, a shadow library offering free access to pirated books. The case was filed in a New York federal court and because the site's anonymous operators never appeared to defend themselves, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled entirely in the publishers' favor. The judgment was signed on May 19, 2026.
The penalty was calculated at the maximum statutory rate of $150,000 per infringed work across 130 titles. The publishers also argued that Anna's Archive was functioning as a primary source of training data for AI companies including Meta and NVIDIA. Collecting the $19.5 million however is considered essentially impossible. The operators remain anonymous citing fear of lengthy prison sentences and though the court ordered them to unmask themselves within ten days they are widely expected to ignore this. The award mirrors a similarly uncollectable $322 million judgment the music industry won against the same site in a related Spotify case.
The more consequential part of the ruling is the permanent injunction targeting the site's technical infrastructure. Because Anna's Archive routinely evades enforcement by cycling through domain names the injunction orders all domain registries and registrars to permanently disable the site's active domains and block their transfer. More than twenty companies are named including Cloudflare, Njalla, DDOS-Guard and the registries managing the site's current .gl, .pk and .gd domains.
Enforcement will be strongest against American companies within the court's jurisdiction. Most named intermediaries however are foreign entities that have historically ignored U.S. court orders. Notably unlike the Spotify music scrape which Anna's Archive voluntarily removed, the publisher's books remain actively available on the site making it harder for intermediaries to justify inaction. As of writing all three of the site's domains remain live and the operators are widely expected to have backup domains ready to deploy.
Source : TorrentFreak