The Authors Guild applauds the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and thirteen major publishers for bringing a copyright lawsuit against the notorious pirate website Anna’s Archive. Anna’s Archive is a massive source of piracy, hosting some 60 million books and 95 million papers, all in brazen violation of copyright laws around the world. It is the latest in a long series of efforts by book pirates to evade civil and criminal copyright penalties.

As the publishers describe in their complaint, Anna’s Archive mirrored the contents of two of the world’s largest pirate sites, Library Genesis (LibGen) and Z-Library. With the Authors Guild’s assistance, the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI investigated and brought criminal charges against Z-Library’s operators and seized more than 200 domain names in 2022.

Pirate Sites Enable AI Training Theft

The many ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI companies have shown that pirate sites like Anna’s Archive are the source of the massive numbers of stolen copyrighted works used to train large language models.

Books are uniquely valuable training materials. But instead of working with authors and publishers to license them, AI companies have simply taken them from illegal offshore piracy sites, furthering a cycle of theft that, if allowed to continue, will devastate the writing profession, particularly as AI systems are used to generate knockoff books that compete with the human-authored books used to train them.

The Authors Guild thanks the publishers for collectively taking this important action and stands ready to support the effort in any way we can.

Read more:

• AAP press release
• Publishers Weekly article