A group of publishers including the Big Five is taking legal action to prevent the pirate website Anna’s Archive from illegally copying and selling their copyrighted material.
In a filing made March 6 in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 13 book and journal publishers filed suit seeking a permanent injunction to stop Anna’s Archive from copying and distributing millions of infringing files. The suit highlights the magnitude of the material Anna’s Archive has stolen and the unorthodox methods it uses to monetize the material.
In a separate lawsuit brought by Atlantic Recording Corp. in December alleging Anna’s Archive had stolen thousands of audio files from the record label, Atlantic alleged that the website also purported to host “61,344,044 books” and “95,527,824 papers,” as of the December 29, 2025 filing date.
The publishers’ complaint alleges that Anna’s Archive has added over 2 million books and 100,000 papers since Atlantic filed its complaint was filed. The ongoing infringement is in keeping with Anna’s Archive’s goal “to take all the books in the world,” according to the publishers’ complaint.
Compounding the scale of the infringement, the new lawsuit notes that “action is now especially critical 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 and data brokers,” the complaint states.
To try to sidestep questions of legality, Anna’s Archive seeks what it calls donations and it has solicited “other types of support, such as grants, long-term sponsors, high-risk payment providers, perhaps even (tasteful!) ads,” according to the filing.
The lawsuit also asserts that Anna’s Archive “publicly claims to have 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. One court in the Northern District of California recently found that Meta Platforms torrented the contents of Anna’s Archive for use in developing its LLM model Llama.”
In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000 and suggested payment be made using cryptocurrency, the complaint states.
“Anna’s Archive is a brazen pirate operation that steals and distributes millions of literary works while outrageously offering access to AI developers in exchange for crypto payments,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, which is coordinating the lawsuit. “To fight back, we must use all available tools and believe this action in U.S. court will make a difference. The unfortunate reality is that creators face a level of digital piracy today that is so staggering it is almost unbelievable—it is an affront to the public interest.”
Publishers that are taking part in the lawsuit are Apress Media; Cengage Group; Elsevier; Hachette Book Group; HarperCollins; John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman, & Worth Publishing Group, LLC D/B/A Macmillan Learning; Macmillan Publishing Group; McGraw Hill; Pearson Education; Penguin Random House; Simon & Schuster; and Taylor & Francis Group.
