WorldCat “suffered persistent attacks for roughly a year”

The court order, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak, was issued by Judge Michael Watson in US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. “Plaintiff has established that Defendant crashed its website, slowed it, and damaged the servers, and Defendant admitted to the same by way of default,” the ruling said.

Anna’s Archive allegedly began scraping and harvesting data from WorldCat.org in October 2022, “and Plaintiff suffered persistent attacks for roughly a year,” the ruling said. “To accomplish such scraping and harvesting, Defendant allegedly used search bots (automated software applications) that ‘called or pinged the server directly’ and appeared to be ‘legitimate search engine bots from Bing and Google.’”

The court granted OCLC’s motion for default judgment on a breach-of-contract claim related to WorldCat.org terms and conditions, and a trespass-to-chattels claim related to the alleged harm to its website and servers. The court rejected the plaintiff’s tortious-interference-with-contract claim because OCLC’s allegation didn’t include all necessary components to prove the charge, and rejected OCLC’s unjust enrichment claim because it “is preempted by federal copyright law.”

The judgment said Anna’s Archive is permanently enjoyed from “scraping or harvesting WorldCat data from WorldCat. org or OCLC’s servers; using, storing, or distributing the WorldCat data on Anna’s Archive’s websites; and encouraging others to scrape, harvest, use, store, or distribute WorldCat data.” It also must “delete all copies of WorldCat data in possession of or easily accessible to it, including all torrents.”

Data used to make “list of books that need to be preserved”

The “Anna” behind Anna’s Archive revealed the WorldCat scraping in an October 2023 blog post. The post said that because WorldCat has “the world’s largest library metadata collection,” the data would help Anna’s Archive make a “list of books that need to be preserved.”