Piracy (and Anna’s Archive)'s mission is to share information, especially culture, with everyone, regardless of their ability to pay for it and regardless of the geoblocks. Keeping the service hidden may benefit you and the few people that know about it, but it isn’t the purpose of these sites. They felt they were protected enough, and they decided to take another step towards their objective, that’s it.
In practice, nothing’s gonna happen. They already have 4 different domains. Even if they managed to seize the servers and cancel every domain, all of Anna’s Archive data is out there on public torrents, and their software is also FOSS. Anyone can make a mirror.
There’s an Ars Technica article published yesterday or the day before about the book metadata scraping, and a representative for AA came right out and said they deliberately violate copyright law in most countries.
They believe, apparently, that collecting information is more valuable than being legal. In that case, they were ordered by a court to delete the data they scraped and they were not expected to comply (and have not done so). The .org suspension was thought to be related to that. Apparently it is not.
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They should have stayed secret so only you, my friend’s neighbour’s 2nd cousin, once removed, and I knew about them.
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Piracy (and Anna’s Archive)'s mission is to share information, especially culture, with everyone, regardless of their ability to pay for it and regardless of the geoblocks. Keeping the service hidden may benefit you and the few people that know about it, but it isn’t the purpose of these sites. They felt they were protected enough, and they decided to take another step towards their objective, that’s it.
In practice, nothing’s gonna happen. They already have 4 different domains. Even if they managed to seize the servers and cancel every domain, all of Anna’s Archive data is out there on public torrents, and their software is also FOSS. Anyone can make a mirror.
They should host on I2P, if the other domains get nuked.
How is Anna’s Archive legal to begin with?
It isn’t.
There’s an Ars Technica article published yesterday or the day before about the book metadata scraping, and a representative for AA came right out and said they deliberately violate copyright law in most countries.
They believe, apparently, that collecting information is more valuable than being legal. In that case, they were ordered by a court to delete the data they scraped and they were not expected to comply (and have not done so). The .org suspension was thought to be related to that. Apparently it is not.
I see, it’s a good article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/judge-orders-annas-archive-to-delete-scraped-data-no-one-thinks-it-will-comply/