Largest Piracy Library｜US Court Orders Anna’s Archive to Pay $19.5 Million and Blocks Global Domains, Are AIs Trained on It in Trouble?

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The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has issued a default judgment against the shadow library Anna’s Archive, ordering $19.5 million in damages along with a permanent global domain blocking injunction; publishers have also accused Anna’s Archive of being a primary source of training data for AI companies such as Meta and NVIDIA. (Previous coverage: SpaceX IPO filings reveal holdings of 18,700 BTC! Average price $35,320; set to become the world's seventh-largest BTC public company in June) (Background: NVIDIA Q1 earnings report is insane! Revenue hits a record $81.6 billion, Jensen Huang declares "the era of Agentic AI is here," and dividends surge 24-fold) $19.5 million and a global domain blocking injunction—the default judgment signed by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on the 19th has quantified the legal cost for the shadow library Anna’s Archive, but the case is far from simple. Judge Rakoff awarded the statutory maximum of $150,000 for each of the 130 "infringed works," totaling $19.5 million. U.S. copyright law allows for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, and Rakoff granted the full amount. However, whether the money can actually be collected is another matter. The operators of Anna’s Archive have remained strictly anonymous, having publicly stated that they hide their identities to avoid "decades in prison." The default judgment requires them to disclose their identities within 10 days, but it is almost certain to be ignored. In a case related to Spotify, the music industry has already obtained a default judgment of up to $322 million against Anna’s Archive, yet there is no indication that a single cent has been recovered to date. $19.5 million versus $322 million—the commonality between these two figures is that they are both "victories on paper"; true enforcement power comes from elsewhere. Publishers have seen through the tactic Anna’s Archive has used for years: "switching to backup domains when blocked." Therefore, the core weapon of this judgment is not the damages, but the permanent injunction: it requires "all domain registries and registrars" to permanently disable its domains and prevent transfers, effectively freezing the possibility of these domains circulating within the global Domain Name System. The judgment document names over 20 companies and organizations, including: - Cloudflare (CDN and DDoS protection provider) - Njalla (anonymous domain proxy service) - DDOS-Guard (traffic protection service) - TELE Greenland / Tusass (manages .gl domains) - PKNIC (manages .pk domains) - National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Grenada (manages .gd domains) However, this list reveals a critical gap: U.S. court jurisdiction is most effective against domestic companies, but most entities on the list are offshore, and whether they will voluntarily comply with U.S. court orders remains unknown. Additionally, what is worth tracking in the long term regarding this lawsuit is hidden in the publishers' complaint: they explicitly argue that Anna’s Archive does not just provide free e-books to readers, but is also a primary source of training data for large language models built by AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA. This accusation is currently one-sided and has not been cross-examined in court because there was no trial; the defendants were absent from start to finish. But the logical chain it reveals is a problem the entire AI industry is avoiding: if the book data used for model training comes from sources with unclear copyright, does the model trained on this data involve indirect infringement? It is worth noting that in the previous Spotify-related case, Anna’s Archive voluntarily deleted the scraped Spotify data after the music industry obtained a judgment; however, the publishers' books remain accessible on the site. This discrepancy makes it harder for domain intermediaries to avoid enforcing the injunction on the grounds of "self-rectification." A bigger problem lies in the timeline: the speed of copyright litigation cannot keep up with the speed at which AI companies digest training data. By the time a court confirms infringement and seeks damages, that data has long been compressed into model weights and is physically impossible to "return." Regulation always lags behind technology, but it will eventually arrive. What Anna’s Archive is facing today is merely the first link in the entire copyright liability chain to be formally convicted. Who will stand in the dock next is the real question left behind by this judgment.

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