{"id":1325,"date":"2026-08-07T00:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T00:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/07\/online-shadow-libraries-and-why-theyre-being-implicated-in-ai-copyright-lawsuits\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T00:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T00:30:10","slug":"online-shadow-libraries-and-why-theyre-being-implicated-in-ai-copyright-lawsuits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/07\/online-shadow-libraries-and-why-theyre-being-implicated-in-ai-copyright-lawsuits\/","title":{"rendered":"Online shadow libraries \u2013 and why they\u2019re being implicated in AI copyright lawsuits"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span> won gou choi\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n

A few days before Christmas 2025, a secretive online activist group called Anna\u2019s Archive said it had downloaded roughly 86 million audio files and \u200a256 million rows of track metadata from Spotify\u2019s catalogue. <\/p>\n

\u200aAnna\u2019s Archive is a shadow library. It holds one of the world\u2019s largest online collection of pirated books, academic papers and now music. Soon, batches of the files, 300 terrabytes in total<\/a>, started circulating on torrent file-sharing websites. <\/p>\n

By April, a district judge in New York had ordered Anna\u2019s Archive to pay US$322 million dollars in damages to Spotify<\/a> and three major record labels in a copyright infringement case over the hack. Then following month, the same judge ordered Anna\u2019s Archive pay $19.5 million<\/a> in damages to a group of 13 major publishers for illegally copying and distributing works they\u2019ve published. The judgement also ordered internet providers to block access to the site.<\/p>\n

But the people behind Anna\u2019s Archive didn\u2019t show up in court, and these rulings will be very difficult to enforce. <\/p>\n

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly<\/a> podcast, Bal\u00e1zs Bod\u00f3, a professor of information law and policy at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, takes us inside the history of these shadow libraries to explain how thousands of copies of books and academic articles ended up in these online archives. <\/p>\n

\n

Anna\u2019s Archive, is just the latest iteration of this endless stream of people who from since the beginning of time, try to archive everything, says Bod\u00f3.<\/p>\n

During the last 20 to 30 years, there have been countless efforts to build digital libraries. Shadow libraries, we call them, because they are text collections, but they are not sanctioned officially.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With a number of AI companies currently facing copyright lawsuits over allegations they\u2019ve used shadow libraries to train their large language models, we ask what this means for the future of these online archives. <\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Listen to Bodo on The Conversation Weekly<\/a> podcast.<\/em> <\/p>\n

Disclosure statement<\/h2>\n

Bal\u00e1zs Bod\u00f3 has received ERC funding. He was the project lead for Creative Commons Hungary and a member of Hungary\u2019s National Copyright Expert Group. He has advised several public and private institutions on digital archives, content distribution, online communities, business development.<\/em> <\/p>\n

Credits<\/h2>\n

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany with editing help from Ashlynne McGhee. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl.<\/em><\/p>\n

Newsclips in this episode from India Today<\/a>, CBS News<\/a>, CBS Miami<\/a> and NBC News<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed<\/a> or find out how else to listen here<\/a>. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

won gou choi\/Shutterstock A few days before Christmas 2025, a secretive online activist group called Anna\u2019s Archive said it had downloaded roughly 86 million audio files and \u200a256 million rows of track metadata from Spotify\u2019s catalogue. \u200aAnna\u2019s Archive is a shadow library. It holds one of the world\u2019s largest online collection of pirated books, academic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}