A computer screen with an image of a library on it. — won gou choi/Shutterstock

Gemma Ware, The Conversation

A few days before Christmas 2025, a secretive online activist group called Anna’s Archive said it had downloaded roughly 86 million audio files and 256 million rows of track metadata from Spotify’s catalogue.

Anna’s Archive is a shadow library. It holds one of the world’s largest online collection of pirated books, academic papers and now music. Soon, batches of the files, 300 terrabytes in total, started circulating on torrent file-sharing websites.

By April, a district judge in New York had ordered Anna’s Archive to pay US$322 million dollars in damages to Spotify and three major record labels in a copyright infringement case over the hack. Then following month, the same judge ordered Anna’s Archive pay $19.5 million in damages to a group of 13 major publishers for illegally copying and distributing works they’ve published. The judgement also ordered internet providers to block access to the site.

But the people behind Anna’s Archive didn’t show up in court, and these rulings will be very difficult to enforce.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, Balázs Bodó, a professor of information law and policy at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, takes us inside the history of these shadow libraries to explain how thousands of copies of books and academic articles ended up in these online archives.

Anna’s Archive, is just the latest iteration of this endless stream of people who from since the beginning of time, try to archive everything, says Bodó.

During the last 20 to 30 years, there have been countless efforts to build digital libraries. Shadow libraries, we call them, because they are text collections, but they are not sanctioned officially.

With a number of AI companies currently facing copyright lawsuits over allegations they’ve used shadow libraries to train their large language models, we ask what this means for the future of these online archives.

Listen to Bodo on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Disclosure statement

Balázs Bodó has received ERC funding. He was the project lead for Creative Commons Hungary and a member of Hungary’s National Copyright Expert Group. He has advised several public and private institutions on digital archives, content distribution, online communities, business development.

Credits

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany with editing help from Ashlynne McGhee. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from India Today, CBS News, CBS Miami and NBC News.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Gemma Ware, Head of Audio, The Conversation UK, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.