Anna’s Archive has already faced its fair share of legal trouble and domain name problems this year.

The popular shadow library was sued by Spotify and several major record labels in late December and lost many of its domain names .

The site responded by adding new domain names. After losing its .LI domain last week, it added .VG,.PK, and .GD as new alternatives . However, this does not mean that the pressure is fading. Within a matter of days, the .VG domain was already suspended by the domain registrar.

63 Million Pirated Books

After watching the music industry’s legal push, a group of thirteen major publishers has also sprung into action. In a complaint filed at a New York federal court last week, they accuse Anna’s Archive of staggering copyright infringement by hosting 63 million books and 95 million papers, most of which are pirated.

“Defendants shamelessly describe themselves as a collection of ‘pirates’ not ‘bound by the law’,” the complaint reads.

The publishers highlight that the site facilitated 763,000 downloads per day last Tuesday, as reported by the site’s own statistics. These downloads are predominantly unauthorized, they add.

“Plaintiffs are not aware that any of the copyright-protected works on Anna’s Archive are licensed or authorized by the copyright owners; to the contrary, their reproduction and distributions are blatantly illegal infringements,” the complaint notes.

The publishers also highlight the AI training angle. They note that the shadow library provided high-speed access to 140+ million texts to LLM developers in China, Russia, and elsewhere. This includes a blog post titled “ If You’re an LLM, Please Read This ” which specifically targets AI companies.

The complaint alleged that Anna’s Archive reportedly charges significant fees for premium access, citing a LinkedIn post that mentioned a $200,000 donation.

“The amount of the ‘enterprise-level donation’ is not specified on the Website but it is reported to be $200,000. In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000,” the complaint notes.

The Injunction is Key

With 130 copyrighted works mentioned in the complaint, and damages up to $150,000 per infringed work, the publishers seek up to $19.5 million in compensation. However, with the site’s operators being unknown and unreachable, chances are slim that this amount will be paid.

The publishers are aware of this. In fact, if we carefully read the framing of their complaint, it appears that the legal action is predominantly intended to target domain names and other technical infrastructure of Anna’s Archive.

In recent weeks, the music industry injunction in the Atlantic/Spotify case has helped to take out several domain names. However, Anna’s Archive has since removed music-related content from the site. Therefore, the publishers now seek a similar injunction.

“Were the Defendants to repost the contents of its illegal repository of stolen works without these audio files, the Atlantic Order would still be satisfied. Nor can the publisher Plaintiffs in this case enforce the Atlantic Order to protect their own copyrights,” the complaint reads.

Injunction Targeting Hosts, Registrars, and Registries

The publishers want to play their part in taking Anna’s Archive offline, and they therefore request an injunction to protect their copyrights. This proposed injunction requires the site and its operator to halt all infringing activity and destroy all pirated books and articles.

More importantly, the injunction would also require third-party intermediaries to stop providing services to the shadow library. This applies to data centers, and hosting and service providers, domain registrars, and domain registries.

The proposed injunction would apply to all current domain names, as well as “any other websites that host the infringing content or directly facilitate its distribution.”

At the time of writing, the court has yet to sign off on the requested injunction. Whether that order will be enough to keep Anna’s Archive offline for good, given its track record of quickly securing new domains, has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of the complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available here (pdf) . The exhibit listing works in suit can be found here (pdf) .

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Last May, the Guardia di Finanza announced that 2,282 pirate IPTV subscribers had been fined across 80 Italian provinces.

The user details came from a criminal investigation in Lecce that dismantled a large IPTV operation, leaving behind a subscriber database that authorities put to immediate use.

Those fines, typically starting at €154 and rising to €5,000 for repeat offenders, were only the beginning. The same pirate IPTV (Pezzotto) users were in for more trouble.

Two Bills, Same Offense

In the autumn of 2025, DAZN sent letters to many of the pirate IPTV users who were already fined, offering to settle a civil damages claim for €500. This new payment request was in addition to the state fine, not instead of it.

Taking a page from this playbook, Serie A followed with its own damages demand. In January, the league’s CEO, Luigi De Siervo, announced that lawyers sent approximately 2,000 letters to individuals who were previously identified by the Guardia di Finanza, requesting €1,000 each as a settlement for the damages caused by their illegal streaming.

In late February, Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo confirmed that the first payments have now been received. As with the DAZN case, these payments are also linked to Criminal Case no. 7719/2022 at the Tribunal of Lecce.

“Finally, even in our country, we are restoring the rule of law,” De Siervo said in a statement, adding that this is “only the beginning.”

“Those who use the pezzotto or illegally watch matches on apps, pirate IPTV, or via VPN, must know that they will be identified by the competent authorities, will have to pay fines of up to €5,000 as provided by law, and will above all be required to pay an additional €1,000 to Serie A as compensation for damages. Piracy is theft, period.”

Serie A does not mention how many payments it has received in response to the thousands of letters it sent out. This could be less than a handful, for now.

Follow The Money

It is clear that the messaging aims to deter future IPTV pirates, suggesting that even a VPN can’t secure them. While this statement is technically correct, it deserves some nuance.

The IPTV pirates who were identified in this case did not have their connections monitored in any way. Instead, the IPTV users were identified through their payment details, banking data, and other personal information obtained as part of a criminal investigation into an IPTV operator.

This is a notable distinction, as defense lawyers in the Lecce case have argued that some of the administrative fines issued lack technical evidence of actual piracy, resting solely on the payment trail.

One lawyer filed formal correction requests with Italian media, stressing that no IP addresses were identified, no devices were seized, and no specific copyrighted work was named in the citations. However, those challenges have not prevented the compensation letters from going out, or the payments from coming in.

Looming Threat

The Lecce case is one of several active proceedings. There are several other prosecutions, and, with permission from the Prosecutor’s Office, more details of pirate subscribers are reportedly shared with rightsholders.

Italy’s Minister for Sport, Andrea Abodi, went even further in October, suggesting that the names of those caught buying illegal subscriptions could eventually be published in a public naming and shaming campaign. “It’s beyond privacy concerns; it’s a crime,” he said at the time.

For now, however, the government appears content to let the financial pressure do the work. This also serves as a deterrent message, as those who received the €1,000 letter from Serie A but chose to ignore it potentially face a more expensive civil claim.

Meanwhile, the official Serie A website features a prominent advertisement for its long-running partner , 1XBET.

This is notable because the same gambling company the Motion Picture Association has flagged as a notorious piracy market , as it is frequently promoted through watermarked pirated movies and other advertisements on prominent pirate sites.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In the race to build the most capable LLM models, several tech companies sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was one of the companies to get sued. In 2023, well-known book authors, including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Meta’s Bittersweet Victory

Last summer, Meta scored a key victory in this case, as the court concluded that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM qualified as fair use, based on the arguments presented in this case. This was a bittersweet victory , however, as Meta remained on the hook for downloading and sharing the books via BitTorrent.

By downloading books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive, Meta relied on BitTorrent transfers. In addition to downloading content, these typically upload data to others as well. According to the authors, this means that Meta was engaged in widespread and direct copyright infringement.

In recent months, the lawsuit continued based on this remaining direct copyright infringement claim. While both parties collected additional evidence through the discovery process, it remained unclear what defense Meta would use. Until now.

Seeding Pirated Books is Fair Use

Last week, Meta served a supplemental interrogatory response at the California federal court, which marks a new direction in its defense. For the first time, the company argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users during the torrent download process also qualifies as fair use.

Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data. In the case of Anna’s Archive, Meta said, the datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads, making BitTorrent the only practical option.

“Meta used BitTorrent because it was a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets, and in the case of Anna’s Archive, those datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads,” Meta’s attorney wrote.

“Accordingly, to the extent Plaintiffs can come forth with evidence that their works or portions thereof were theoretically ‘made available’ to others on the BitTorrent network during the torrent download process, this was part-and-parcel of the download of Plaintiffs’ works in furtherance of Meta’s transformative fair use purpose.”

In other words, obtaining the millions of books that were needed to engage in the fair use training of its LLM, required the BitTorrent up- and downloading, which ultimately serves the same fair use purpose.

Authors and Meta Disagree over Fair Use Timing

The authors were not happy with last week’s late Friday submission and the new defense. On Monday morning, their lawyers filed a letter with Judge Vince Chhabria flagging the late-night filing as an improper end-run around the discovery deadline.

They point out that Meta had been aware of the uploading claims since November 2024, but that it never brought up this fair use defense in the past, not even when the court asked about it.

The letter specifically mentions that while Meta has a “continuing duty” to supplement discovery under Rule 26(e), this rule does not create a “loophole” allowing a party to add new defenses to its advantage after a court deadline has passed.

“Meta (for understandable reasons) never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after this Court raised the issue with Meta last November,” the lawyers write.

Meta’s legal team fired back the following day, filing their own letter with Judge Chhabria. This letter explains that the fair use argument for the direct copyright infringement claim is not new at all.

Meta pointed to the parties’ joint December 2025 case management statement, in which it had explicitly flagged the defense, and noted that the author’s own attorney had addressed it at a court hearing days later.

“In short, Plaintiffs’ assertion that Meta ‘never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after’ the November 2025 hearing, is false” Meta’s attorney writes in the letter.

Authors Admit No Harm, No Infringing Output

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Meta’s interrogatory response also cites deposition testimony from the authors themselves, using their own words to bolster its fair use defense.

The company notes that every named author has admitted they are unaware of any Meta model output that replicates content from their books. Sarah Silverman, when asked whether it mattered if Meta’s models never output language from her book, testified that “It doesn’t matter at all.”

Meta argues these admissions undercut any theory of market harm. If the authors themselves cannot point to infringing output or lost sales, the lawsuit is less about protecting their books and more about challenging the training process itself, which the court already ruled was fair use.

These admissions were central to Meta’s fair use defense on the training claims, which Meta won last summer. Whether they carry the same weight in the remaining BitTorrent distribution dispute has yet to be seen.

‘U.S. AI Leadership at Stake’

In its interrogatory response, Meta added further weight by stressing that its investment in AI has helped the U.S. to establish U.S. global leadership, putting the country ahead of geopolitical competitors. That’s a valuable asset worth treasuring, it indirectly suggested.

As the case moves forward, Judge Chhabria will have to decide whether to allow this “fair use by technical necessity” defense. Needless to say, this will be of vital importance to this and many other AI lawsuits, where the use of shadow libraries is at stake.

For now, the BitTorrent distribution claims remain the last live piece of a lawsuit filed in 2023. Whether Judge Chhabria will allow Meta’s new defense to proceed has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Meta’s supplemental interrogatory response is available here (pdf) . The authors’ letter to Judge Chhabria can be found here (pdf) . Meta’s response to that letter is available here (pdf) .

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platforms WordPress.com and Tumblr, has been documenting DMCA takedown abuse for well over a decade .

Over the years, the company has highlighted how automated systems flood platforms with inaccurate or incomplete notices. These errors and mistakes are par for the course now, and Automattic even launched its own Hall of Shame to ‘honor’ the worst offenders.

In recent years, it appeared that takedown issues had stabilized somewhat. However, the latest transparency report, covering July through December 2025, shows that challenges remain.

2,431 Notices, 86% Rejected

This week, the company published its latest WordPress.com transparency report , revealing that it processed 2,431 takedown notices during the second half of last year. That is a 20% increase compared to the same period a year earlier.

This data only applies to the number of DMCA notices that are directed at WordPress.com services. It is also worth noting that these notices can contain multiple URLs, making the number of flagged URLs much higher.

While the takedown volume is substantial, that’s not necessarily indicative of a copyright infringement problem. According to Automattic, 86% of all takedown notices were rejected entirely due to various shortcomings.

The rejection rate for WordPress.com takedowns has always been high. Since Automattic began counting in 2014, the platform has processed a total of 123,211 DMCA takedown notices. Of these, only 27% have ever resulted in any removal.

AI-generated DMCA Notices

Over the past half year, however, Automattic saw the rejection rate tick up further due to a new phenomenon: AI-generated DMCA notices.

“We are seeing continued exploitation of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system by third-party monitoring services—in some instances, through the use of AI-generated mass reporting methods,” Automattic’s Trust & Safety team notes.

According to the blogging platform, copyright infringement reporters use AI en masse , presumably to lower costs and maximize revenue.

Automattic specifically calls out the company Enforcity, which was by far the top takedown sender with 838 ‘inactionable’ notices in the second half of last year, which represents 34% of all notices sent in that period.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Automattic’s Head of Policy and Process, Steve Blythe, says that the first notices from Enforcity started coming in around August of 2025. These claimed to protect OnlyFans creators, but none of the reported links were associated with infringing material.

“The targets included both static pages with no content, and dynamic search query URLs with keywords pre-filled by the complainants that returned no results. This caused a significant amount of work, as our team manually reviews such notices to screen for abuse,” Blythe says.

“As of September 2025, we contacted Enforcity directly a number of times to make them aware of the issue, but despite assurances that the problems would be addressed, the notices continued.”

Automattic believes that this automated activity is largely driven by payment structures that value volume over accuracy. In January 2026, Enforcity was still sending hundreds of notices, but after repeated outreach, no new DMCA notices came in over the past weeks.

$29 / Month

Explicitly naming a sender isn’t a step that’s taken lightly, but Automattic says that it is important to call out abusive behavior, especially when it takes up valuable resources.

TorrentFreak reached out to Enforcity for a comment, but at the time of publication, the company has yet to reply. If a response comes in, we will update our article accordingly.

For now, public information confirms that the company offers AI-Driven DMCA content protection starting at $29 per month . The service indeed targets creators, specifically those on OnlyFans, for which it created a dedicated success hub .

According to Enforcity’s own website, the takedown service helped customers to remove over 350 million ‘infringements,’ with an impressive 99% success rate, while protecting $600 million in revenue in the process.

TorrentFreak was unable to verify any of these numbers independently.

Regardless, Automattic says it will continue to call out abusive or error-prone reporters, including those who use AI tools.

“The DMCA notification and takedown process is a powerful tool that enables creators to have control over the use and dissemination of their work. However, it is also frequently abused,” Blythe tells us.

“We routinely see invalid and inappropriate submissions from third-party agents that charge creators to scour the web and fire off automated notices, seemingly indiscriminately. With the rapid development of AI technology, the flaws in the DMCA are at risk of increasingly resulting in a chilling effect on freedom of expression,” he adds.

For now, it appears that Automattic’s repeated outreach has had some effect, but whether Enforcity and similar services will change their practices in the long run remains to be seen.

—

Update: In a statement provided to TorrentFreak after publication, Enforcity defended its practices, describing itself as an AI-powered service. While not explicitly addressing the “non-existent” content claims, the company framed the rejected notices as a technical hurdle it is currently addressing.

“We are in direct and ongoing communication with Automattic and continue to work cooperatively to ensure alignment with their platform-specific requirements. If certain submissions were deemed inactionable due to technical or URL-structure factors, we are refining our AI validation safeguards accordingly to prevent similar occurrences,” Enforcity said.

“We are also reviewing whether any historical submissions may have been misattributed or submitted without proper authorization, as safeguarding the integrity of our enforcement process is a priority.”

The company also pointed out that it has a 95.6% content removal rate across reported URLs at Google . The company notes that this high removal rate reflects its overall precision and effectiveness.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.