Maybe you're thinking of Sci-Hub and its founder, Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan?
I could not find a location on Anna's Archive's wiki page.
The official Anna's Archive Reddit account, AnnaArchivist, has responded to an r/Annas_Archive post linking the same Torrent Freak article:
Thanks! We're not making any public statements about this lawsuit but rest assured we're fine.
Would you be able to share where you learned that Anna's Archive is based in Kazakhstan?
Regarding the operating location(s) of Anna's Archive, OCLC is alleging the following (pages 7-9):
C. Defendants Rely on Sophisticated Technology and Online Practices to Conceal their Identities.
Defendants understand that their pirate library enterprise and related activities, here, hacking and harvesting OCLC’s WorldCat® records, are illegal. Defendants admit that they are engaging in and facilitating mass copyright infringement, stating, “[w]e deliberately violate the copyright law in most countries.” In another blog post, Defendants noted that their activities could lead to arrest and “decades of prison time.” Defendants have also recognized that their hacking and distribution of OCLC’s data is improper, acknowledging that WorldCat® is a “proprietary database,” that OCLC’s “business model requires protecting their database,” and that Defendants are “giving it all away. :-).”
Because Defendants understand their actions infringe on copyright laws, amongst others, Defendants go to great lengths to remain anonymous to ensure both that Anna’s Archive’s domains are not taken down and to avoid the legal consequences of their actions, including civil lawsuits where parties like OCLC seek to vindicate their rights, as well as criminal and regulatory enforcement actions undertaken by government entities. None of Anna’s Archive’s domains or its online blog provide a business address, business contact, or other contact information that would be found on a legitimate entity’s website.
Defendants have explained in a blog post that they are “being very careful not to leave any trace [of their online activities], and having strong operational security.” For instance, Anna’s Archive utilizes a VPN with “[a]ctual court-tested no-log policies with long track records of protecting privacy.” Each of the Anna’s Archive domains are registered using foreign hosts, registrars, and registrants in order to conceal the identity of the site operators. Additionally, Defendants rely on multiple proxy servers to maintain anonymity. Defendants also use a free version of Cloudflare, a top-level hosting provider, so that they do not have to provide any payment or other identifying information. Defendants selected Cloudflare because they claim Cloudflare has resisted requests to take down websites for copyright infringement. The individuals behind Anna’s Archive also use usernames as pseudonyms to mask their identities online.
Through the work of a cyber security and digital forensic investigation firm, OCLC was able to identify one of the individuals behind Anna’s Archive by name and locate a United States address, Defendant Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo. However, the physical address and contact information of Anna’s Archive and the identities and contact information of the John Does remain unknown. It is highly likely that Anna’s Archive is a non-domestic, foreign entity, based on the findings from OCLC’s investigator, as set forth below.
OCLC explained the above in their Motion To Serve Defendant Anna’s Archive By Email, as justification for why they seek "permission to serve Anna’s Archive by alternative means, here, email, pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(h)(2) and (f)(3)."
As to how Anna's Archive accomplished their data scraping, this is what OCLC is claiming (see page 62-63):
These attacks were accomplished with bots (automated software applications) that “scraped” and harvested data from WorldCat.org and other WorldCat®-based research sites and that called or pinged the server directly. These bots were initially masked to appear as legitimate search engine bots from Bing or Google.
To scrape or harvest the data on WorldCat.org, the bots searched WorldCat.org results, running a script based on OCN for individual JavaScript Object Notation, or “JSON,” records. As a result, WorldCat® data including freely accessible and enriched data, such as OCNs, were scraped from individual results on WorldCat.org.
The bots also harvested data from WorldCat.org by pretending to be an internet browser, directly calling or “pinging” OCLC’s servers, and bypassing the search, or user interface, of WorldCat.org. More robust WorldCat® data was harvested directly from OCLC’s servers, including enriched data not available through the WorldCat.org user interface.
Finally, WorldCat® data was harvested from a member’s website incorporating WorldCat® Discovery Services, a subscription-based variation of WorldCat.org that is available only to a member’s patrons. Again, the hacker pinged OCLC’s servers to harvest WorldCat® records directly from the servers. To do this through WorldCat® Discovery Services/FirstSearch, the hacker obtained and used the member’s credentials to authenticate the requests to the server as a member library.
From WorldCat® Discovery Services, hackers harvested 2 million richer WorldCat® records that included data not available in WorldCat.org. This hacking method resulted in the harvesting of some of OCLC’s most proprietary fields of WorldCat® data.
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.
Despite OCLC’s best efforts, OCLC’s customers experienced many significant disruptions in paid services during the aforementioned period as a result of the attacks on WorldCat.org, requiring OCLC to create system workarounds to ensure services functioned.
During this time, customers threatened and likely did cancel their products and services with OCLC due to these disruptions.
Because OCLC had to combat these persistent hacking attacks, OCLC was forced to divert existing personnel and resources from OCLC’s other products and services. As a result, OCLC’s development and improvements to other products and services were delayed and limited.
OCLC has devoted, at various times, ten or more employees to respond to and mitigate the harm from these attacks from October 2022 to present.
Here are the court filings if anyone would like to read them:
https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.ohsd.287709/
The following is a link to the docket (which the above link draws from), so people can follow the progress of the lawsuit:
A lawsuit filed by American nonprofit OCLC claims that its WorldCat database was subjected to a year-long hack at the hands of Anna's Archive.
> 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.
Blog: Unprecedented seizure of our domains with books on rare languages | Z-Library | Z-Library. Download books for free. Find books
> Today we are forced to share some sad news - yesterday many of our domains were seized again. We should highlight that the majority of the seized domains were not mirrors of the Z-Library website. Instead, they were separate sub-projects, containing only books in rare languages of the world, and their blocking is perplexing. For instance, these domains included books in Tamil, Mongolian, Catalan, Urdu, Pashto, and other languages: > > afrikaans-books.org > > bengali-books.org > > urdu-books.org > > marathi-books.org > > chamorro-books.org > > Over the 15 years of the project's existence, we've managed to collect an impressive collection of rare texts in many uncommon languages. These domains featured many unique texts that can't be found anywhere else, including rare books, documents, and manuscripts. All of this is a priceless heritage, contributing to the preservation and study of world cultures, and serving as important material for researchers in linguistics, anthropology, and history.
Z-Library also states in the blog post that they did not lose the files, just the domains.
Authorities had not given the the go-ahead to print the books and calendars
>Authorities have caught two Ho Chi Minh City-based firms printing more than 15,000 pirated copies of books and 2024 calendars, with a combined weight exceeding 15 metric tons. > >Police officers from the Ministry of Public Security and the city, in coordination with inspectors from the municipal Department of Information and Communications on Monday morning raided Kien A Packing Production and Trading Service Company in the city’s outlying Cu Chi District. > >The company was caught with 3,000 illegally printed copies of ‘Kinh Truong Tho diet toi’ (Long-life sutra destroys sins) from Ton giao (religion) Publishing House and 9,000 illegally printed copies of 'Sherlock Holmes' from the Writers’ Association Publishing House. The combined weight of the books was 10 metric tons. > >Authorities had not given their approval for the books to be printed. All of the illegally copies have since been seized.
Mentioning this since the project Anna's Archive compiles several datasets and their corresponding torrents.
Anna's Archive, whose aim is to "archive all the books in the world, and make them widely accessible," pulls from a number of shadow library sources; the project provides its own torrent links (via Tor) for Library Genesis, Z-lib, Internet Archive, among others, plus Library Genesis's torrents. In the datasets linked below, you can click on a given source and find its onion site or the torrents provided by the shadow library itself (in the case of Library Genesis, for example).
...almost all files shown on Anna’s Archive are available through torrents. Below is a list of the different data sources that we use, with links to their torrents. Our own torrents are available on Tor.
Sources include
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1330512
> Below are direct quotes from the filings. > > OpenAI > >As noted in Paragraph 32, supra, the OpenAI Books2 dataset can be estimated to contain about 294,000 titles. The only “internet-based books corpora” that have ever offered that much material are notorious “shadow library” websites like Library Genesis (aka LibGen), Z-Library (aka B-4ok), Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik. The books aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent systems. These flagrantly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community: for instance, an AI training dataset published in December 2020 by EleutherAI called “Books3” includes a recreation of the Bibliotik collection and contains nearly 200,000 books. On information and belief, the OpenAI Books2 dataset includes books copied from these “shadow libraries,” because those are the most sources of trainable books most similar in nature and size to OpenAI’s description of Books2. > > Meta > >Bibliotik is one of a number of notorious “shadow library” websites that also includes Library Genesis (aka LibGen), Z-Library (aka B-ok), and Sci-Hub. The books and other materials aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent systems. These shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community because of the large quantity of copyrighted material they host. For that reason, these shadow libraries are also flagrantly illegal. > > This article from Ars Tecnica covers a few more details. Filings are viewable at the law firm's site here.
tldr: a huge torrent of books straight from the academic publisher De Gruyter
cross-posted from: https://teddit.net/r/DataHoarder/comments/1463ah3/degruyter_collection/
>Trying again because reddit filters, let's see if I get it right this time.
>
>After months of scraping I finally finished downloading almost every single degruyter book to which I have access, which are many. And so I created a torrent.
>
> magnet:?xt=urn:btih:76f573241a0126fb1ab0aa5540cc7493c045ae74&dn=Degruyter%20Imprints%20v2%20%5b09-06-23%5d&tr=http%3a%2f%2fatrack.pow7.com%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fopen.stealth.si%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.cyberia.is%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fretracker.lanta-net.ru%3a2710%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.moeking.me%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.tiny-vps.com%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.torrent.eu.org%3a451%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=http%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fopentra
>
>The content of the torrent is pretty much these https://www.degruyter.com/search?query=*&startItem=0&pageSize=10&sortBy=mostrecent&documentVisibility=all&documentTypeFacet=book&publisherFacet=De+Gruyter%7EDe+Gruyter+Oldenbourg%7EDe+Gruyter+Saur%7EDe+Gruyter+Mouton
>
>Neither the files nor the series are renamed. They all bear the original filenaming which is much better since it can easily be keyed to the book's unique page.
>
>Note: this torrent includes only the abovementioned degruyter imprints. In the upcoming weeks I will create a second torrent, with the degruyter partner publishers: about 100k books from these publishers
>
>https://i.imgur.com/mSKrLto.png
>And in few months the last torrent which will include the degruyter journals.
>
>This endeavour would have not been possible were not for all the people that granted me academic access, wrote scripts for me, helped me ensure the integrity of the files, and so on. Sadly many files, especially epubs, are corrupted or downright missing at the source. There are also some dupes that, being part of multiple series and subseries, were downloaded twice. Total torrent size is about 2tb.
>
>https://i.imgur.com/BjqsUqJ.png
>of course everything is actively being shared with nexus/annas/libgen as well as private groups and friends and the classicist discord channel. I did not waste months so I could jerkoff on the big numbah, therefore I want the files to be shared and reshared as much as possible in order to grant indirect academic access to all those students (me being one) whose universities cannot afford degruyter subscriptions.
>
>Last note: all the files are retail untouched (according to BIB standards, if anyone here is a member). So if some epub has shitty formatting blame the publisher.
>
>: fixed magnet url
>The product of a decade of research, this landmark collection is the first of four volumes in the Women Writing Africa Project, which seeks to document and map the extraordinary and diverse landscape of African women’s oral and written literatures. Presenting voices rarely heard outside Africa, some recorded as early as the mid-nineteenth century, as well as rediscovered gems by such well-known authors as Bessie Head and Doris Lessing, this volume reveals a living cultural legacy that will revolutionize the understanding of African women’s literary and cultural production.
> Each text is accompanied by a scholarly headnote that provides detailed historical background. An introduction by the editors sets the broader historical stage and explores the many issues involved in collecting and combining orature and literature from diverse cultures in one volume. Unprecedented in its scope and achievement, this volume will be an essential resource for anyone interested in women’s history, culture, and literature in Africa, and worldwide.