Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online

Mid August, shadow library Anna’s Archive faced extended downtime, which had many regular visitors concerned. These worries didn’t come out of nowhere as the site has been under quite a bit of legal pressure in recent months. Lawsuit Takes Domains Offline In January, the site lost its flagship .org domain. Initially it wasn’t clear what was behind this action but unsealed court records eventually connected it to a lawsuit filed by music companies. This case was a direct response to a Spotify scrape Anna’s Archive announced a few weeks earlier. The music companies obtained an injunction from a U.S. federal court to go after the site’s domain names. This took out not only the .ORG domain but also the .SE domain, as well as the .PM and .VG domains that were put in place as backups. Anna’s Archive eventually landed on .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, which remain active today. These are connected to registrars and registries based outside the United States that, apparently, do not comply with U.S. court orders. Two Lawsuits, $340 Million The music industry injunction also came with a substantial default judgment that was handed down in April. This includes a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive, who failed to show up in court. This judgment was soon followed by a similar request from a group of major book publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, who sued the shadow library at a New York federal court. That case also resulted in a default judgment, with a damages award that is smaller, but still substantial at $19.5 million. In addition, the court also issued an injunction targeting Anna’s Archive’s domain registrars and registries. ‘Coordinated Attack’ With this backdrop, it is no surprise that legal troubles came to mind when the site became unreachable earlier this month. However, this time around, the threat appears to have come from elsewhere. After the site came back online, the official AnnaArchivist account attributed it to a coordinated attack by an unnamed party. “Apologies for the issues. We suspect a coordinated attack. We’ve mitigated the attack vectors…” the message read, while noting that memberships already include one to two extra days per month to account for downtime. Theoretically, an attack can also come from a rogue anti-piracy group, but there’s no evidence for that. A scam or phishing operation, which tries to cash in on Anna’s Archive search traffic, is another option. Neither is confirmed. What Options Are Left? Looking more broadly at the enforcement action that has taken place over the past months, we see that U.S. courts have run into their jurisdictional borders on the Internet. This likely comes as a disappointment for rightsholders, but it also offers a clear takeaway. U.S. courts can’t reach domains registered beyond their jurisdiction. That’s likely to increase calls for site-blocking legislation, a measure the industry has long favored and that remains high on the political agenda in the United States.