Anna's Archive Owes $340M and Has Lost Domains, but Keeps Running

The shadow library Anna's Archive is going through a rough patch: over the past few months it has been hit by a wave of court rulings, fines running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and domain-name seizures. Even so, the site is still up and running.

Domains Under Fire

In January the site lost its flagship .org domain. At first the reason was unclear, but unsealed court documents tied the seizure to a suit by music companies. The trigger was a data-scraping effort targeting Spotify that had been announced shortly beforehand.

The music industry secured an injunction in a US federal court aimed at the domain names. It wasn't just .org that took the hit, but .se as well, along with the backup .pm and .vg. In the end Anna's Archive moved to the .gl, .pk and .gd domains, which are still active today — their registrars and registries are located outside the US and, by all appearances, don't answer to American court orders.

Two Suits, $340 Million

Along with the injunction, April also brought a default judgment: the unknown operators of Anna's Archive, who never appeared in court, were ordered to pay $322 million. Next came a suit from a group of major publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier and HarperCollins, who took their case to a federal court in New York. That case likewise ended in a default judgment — a smaller sum, but still substantial: $19.5 million. The court additionally issued an injunction directed at the library's registrars and registries.

A “Coordinated Attack”

Against this backdrop, it's no surprise that many linked the site's outage in mid-August to legal pressure. This time, though, the cause seems to have been something else. After service was restored, the official AnnaArchivist account blamed the disruption on a “coordinated attack” by an unnamed party, noting that the attack vectors had been neutralized. It also reminded users that membership already includes an extra day or two per month to cover downtime.

In theory the attack could have come from an anti-piracy group, but there's no evidence of that. A scam or phishing scheme trying to cash in on the library's search traffic can't be ruled out either. Neither theory has been confirmed.

What's Next

The story shows that American justice has run up against the limits of its jurisdiction on the internet. US courts can't reach domains registered beyond their borders. For rights holders that's a frustration, but also a lesson: expect louder calls for site-blocking legislation — a measure the industry has long pushed for and one that remains high on the US political agenda.

Source: Hacker News