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.

  • Snot Flickerman
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    194 months ago

    https://annas-blog.org/worldcat-scrape.html

    WorldCat

    That is when we set our sights on the largest book database in the world: WorldCat. This is a proprietary database by the non-profit OCLC, which aggregates metadata records from libraries all over the world, in exchange for giving those libraries access to the full dataset, and having them show up in end-users’ search results.

    Even though OCLC is a non-profit, their business model requires protecting their database. Well, we’re sorry to say, friends at OCLC, we’re giving it all away. :-)

    Over the past year, we’ve meticulously scraped all WorldCat records. At first, we hit a lucky break. WorldCat was just rolling out their complete website redesign (in Aug 2022). This included a substantial overhaul of their backend systems, introducing many security flaws. We immediately seized the opportunity, and were able scrape hundreds of millions (!) of records in mere days.

    After that, security flaws were slowly fixed one by one, until the final one we found was patched about a month ago. By that time we had pretty much all records, and were only going for slightly higher quality records. So we felt it is time to release!

    • @MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yea OK they’re fucked. I really really doubt they’ll be able to claim the data is solely comprised of the open works saved within that database. The only way they’d be able to get away with it is if they’ve meticulously harvested the data such that they only ever retrieved the open works or public domain works.

      Anything not in that list or otherwise made available solely via their nonprofit efforts is going to be ammo in the lawsuit. Ammo that will hit its target.