American nonprofit OCLC is known globally for its leading database of bibliographic records, WorldCat. A few months ago, many of these records were posted publicly by the shadow library search engine, Anna’s Archive. OCLC believes that this is the result of a year-long hack and, with a lawsuit filed at an Ohio federal court, it demands damages.
WorldCat Sues Anna’s Archive
It is no secret that publishers fiercely oppose the search engine’s stated goals. The same also applies to OCLC, which has now elevated its concerns into a full-blown lawsuit, filed this month at a federal court in Ohio.
The complaint accuses Washington citizen Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo and several “John Does” of operating the search engine and scraping WorldCat data. The scraping is equated to a cyberattack by OCLC and started around the time Anna’s Archive launched.
“Beginning in the fall of 2022, OCLC began experiencing cyberattacks on WorldCat.org and OCLC’s servers that significantly affected the speed and operations of WorldCat.org, other OCLC products and services, and OCLC’s servers and network infrastructure,” OCLC’s complaint notes.
“These attacks continued throughout the following year, forcing OCLC to devote significant time and resources toward non-routine network infrastructure enhancements, maintenance, and troubleshooting.”
The non-profit says that it spent roughly $68 million over the past two years developing and enhancing WorldCat records, which are an essential part of its operation. Having a copy of the data publicly available through Anna’s Archive is a direct threat to its business.
OCLC claims that Anna’s Archive unmasked itself as the “perpetrator of the attacks on WorldCat.org” when it publicly announced its scraping effort. This includes a detailed blog post the operators published on the matter, encouraging the public to use the scraped data.
In addition to harvesting data from WorldCat.org, the defendants are also accused of obtaining and using credentials of a member library to access WorldCat Discovery Services. This opened the door to yet more detailed records that are not available on WorldCat.org.
OCLC says that it spent significant time and resources to address the ‘attacks’ on its systems.
“These hacking attacks materially affected OCLC’s production systems and servers, requiring around-the-clock efforts from November 2022 to March 2023 to attempt to limit service outages and maintain the production systems’ performance for customers.
“To respond to these ongoing attacks, OCLC spent over 1.4 million dollars on its systems’ infrastructure and devoted nearly 10,000 employee hours to the same,” the complaint adds.
I mean… it’ll all come down to how they accessed the data. If they had a public portal and no EULA, they can push rocks. If the data wasn’t public or the ‘theives’ had to use non-standard channels, or otherwise violated an EULA, they’re likely screwed. Especially if they had to go through abnormal channels.
I know their data can be accessed publicly, but I’m pretty sure it’s under license. You cannot just use any old thing found in public… That’s the biggest reasons the AI models are technically theft: they weren’t licensed to commercially profit off of 99.99% of the things their LLMs are trained on, but the law and politicians are WAY behind the times. Commercial data they’d normally have to pay for is suddenly magically OK when laundered through an LLM…
“AI models are technically theft: they weren’t licensed to commercially profit off of 99.99%”
This is simply a lie. There is no license like what you describe. You never need a license to view or learn from something given away completely free on the internet. You guys keep pretending there’s a law that says otherwise . There is not or you’d post it.
Copyright does not cover viewing or experiencing a piece.
Notice how I said “commercially profit” too. Read all the words next time.
Also LLMs do not “learn” anything, you idiot. That’s the entire point. They mathematically blender things. They DO NOT learn and create.