Pirate Library WeLib Faces $19.5 Million Judgment and Domain Takedown Order
A New York federal judge has issued a default judgment against the pirate library WeLib, ordering it to pay $19.5 million in damages to thirteen major publishers. The judgment also mandates that domain registries, registrars, and hosting providers, including Cloudflare and Njalla, disable WeLib's domains. This legal action follows a lawsuit initiated by a group of book companies, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, who previously sued another shadow library, Anna’s Archive. WeLib, which allegedly copied code and books from Anna’s Archive, did not respond to the lawsuit, leading to the default judgment. The court awarded each publisher $150,000 per book for ten of their works, totaling $1.5 million per publisher, which is the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement. Despite the judgment, WeLib's operators remain unidentified, making the collection of damages uncertain. The injunction also requires WeLib's operators to destroy all unauthorized copies of the publishers' wor...
