IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—Book publishers take on alleged book pirate website Anna’s Archive, (Mar 11, 2026)
Organizations Mentioned:Apress Media, LLC | Cengage Learning, Inc. | Elsevier Inc. | John Wiley & Sons, Inc. | Oppenheim & Zebrak, LLP | Pearson Education, Inc.
By Matthew Hersh, J.D.
The online library, which features a “staggering” number of works, is allegedly moving into the illicit artificial intelligence space.
A pirate library that hosts and makes available for download tens of millions of books and papers should be held liable for the direct copyright infringement of over one hundred different individual works from a wide range of prominent publishing houses, a new federal lawsuit asserts. The lawsuit, brought by the book publishers against the anonymous owners of the massive online collection, also warns that the library is in the process of making its allegedly pirated works available for developers of AI large language models in Russia and China and elsewhere (Apress Media, LLC v. Anna's Archive, No. 1:26-cv-01850 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 6, 2026)).
The lawsuit takes aim at Anna’s Archive, an ostensibly nonprofit organization that bills itself as “[t]he largest truly open library in human history.” (Because the Archive’s owners and operators are not known, the lawsuit names them only as “Doe” defendants.) The Archive, which is built on open-source code, claims to have 63,632,048 books and 95,689,475 papers “preserved forever,” in the Archive’s words. The datasets used in Anna’s Archive are completely open, the website promotes and can be “mirrored in bulk using torrents.” A sampling of the works available for download include notable books such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls by Richard Russo, and many others.
But the materials in this online library are not offered legally, the complaint asserts. Anna’s Archive launched in July 2022 as the “Pirate Library Mirror”—a name that allegedly derived from the fact that the operators “deliberately violate the copyright law.” The archive originally mirrored the contents of other pirate libraries such as Z-Library and Library Genesis, or LibGen. The archive has since “moved beyond mirroring other illegal collections and has acquired additional pirated works,” the complaint asserts, including nearly 13 million files unique to Anna’s Archive. Its “staggering” collection of books, journal articles, and other materials, the complaint notes, is nearly 1 petabyte—or about 1000 terabytes in total.
The publishers’ action is “especially critical,” the complaint recites, in light of reports that Anna’s Archive “is actively advertising that it will provide high speed access to—and indeed has already supplied stolen works of authorship to—developers of large language model AI systems.” In fact, the lawsuit contends, the Archive has allegedly given “high-speed access to its illegal collection of more than 140 million copyrighted texts to companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere, many of them LLMs.” Indeed, the complaint asserts, the Archive “now directly solicits the AI industry to purchase high-speed access to its collection” by posting a blog on its website, entitled “If You’re an LLM, Please Read This,” which allegedly invites LLM developers to copy large amounts of data at fast download speeds by “making an enterprise-level donation.”
The lawsuit asserts only a single claim of direct copyright infringement against the Archive, apparently forgoing any claims for declaratory or injunctive relief or contributory or vicarious infringement. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are: Apress Media, LLC; Cengage Learning, Inc.; Elsevier Inc.; Hachette Book Group, Inc.; HarperCollins Publishers LLC; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group, LLC d/b/a Macmillan Learning; Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC d/b/a Macmillan Publishers; McGraw Hill LLC; Pearson Education, Inc.; Penguin Random House LLC; Simon & Schuster, LLC; and Taylor & Francis Group LLC.
The Case is No. 1:26-cv-01850.
Judge: NA.
Attorneys: Jennifer L. Pariser (Oppenheim & Zebrak, LLP) for Apress Media, LLC, Cengage Learning, Inc. and Elsevier Inc.
Companies: Apress Media, LLC; Cengage Learning, Inc.; Elsevier Inc.
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