WorldCat “endured ongoing attacks for approximately a year”
The court order, which was earlier reported by TorrentFreak, was issued by Judge Michael Watson of the 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 stated.
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.” It added that, to carry out that scraping and harvesting, the 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 its breach-of-contract claim tied to WorldCat.org’s terms and conditions, as well as a trespass-to-chattels claim over the purported damage to its website and servers. It dismissed the plaintiff’s tortious-interference-with-contract claim on the basis that OCLC’s allegation lacked necessary elements, and rejected OCLC’s unjust enrichment claim because it “is preempted by federal copyright law.”
The judgment enjoins Anna’s Archive permanently 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 requires that Anna’s Archive “delete all copies of WorldCat data in possession of or easily accessible to it, including all torrents.”
Data used to compile “list of books that need to be preserved”
The “Anna” behind Anna’s Archive disclosed the WorldCat scraping in an October 2023 blog post. The post argued that because WorldCat houses “the world’s largest library metadata collection,” that dataset would help Anna’s Archive compile a “list of books that need to be preserved.”
