WeLib Ordered to Pay Publishers $19.5 Million in Damages

By Tom Whitfield

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, sitting in Manhattan, ordered the pirate site WeLib to pay 13 publishers $19.5 million in statutory damages on November 9 for willful infringement of 130 copyrighted works.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered the default judgment after WeLib’s operators failed to respond to the publishers’ copyright suit. Marrero awarded $150,000 for each work, the maximum damages available under the Copyright Act for willful infringement. Each publisher listed 10 titles, producing a $1.5 million award for each.

Marrero also directed the companies that register and host WeLib’s domains to take the site offline. That extends the case beyond the operators and damages, placing duties on the infrastructure services that keep a domain reachable.

In May, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, also of the Southern District, entered a default judgment against Anna’s Archive after its operators failed to respond. Rakoff awarded the same $150,000 for each of 130 works, producing another $19.5 million judgment. The WeLib ruling is the second $19.5 million award publishers have won this year against a pirate site.

The two cases are closely linked. When publishers sued WeLib on June 16, they alleged that its operators had “copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive. The complaint also alleged that WeLib sought profit by giving AI developers high-speed access to pirated books and journal articles.

The WeLib suit was organized with help from the Association of American Publishers (AAP). It was filed on June 16 by 13 publishers from the trade, educational, professional and scientific sectors:

• Apress Media
• Cengage Learning
• Elsevier
• Hachette Book Group
• HarperCollins
• John Wiley & Sons
• Macmillan Learning
• Macmillan Publishers
• McGraw Hill
• Pearson Education
• Penguin Random House
• Simon & Schuster
• Taylor & Francis

By its own count, repeated in the complaint, WeLib offered more than 43 million books and 98 million papers. It reported more than 80,000 monthly active users and said users had accessed more than 51 million books in a single month. The complaint presents these as WeLib’s own figures rather than independently audited totals.

Publishers argued that WeLib operated as a business despite presenting itself as a kind of library. Free file downloads were slow. Users who made a donation received faster downloads and skipped waitlists.

The publishers said those donations amounted to paid memberships. Plans ran from $7 a month for 25 fast downloads a day to $90 a month for 1,000 fast downloads a day.

What does the ruling change for publishers and AI developers?

For publishers, the judgment combines a $19.5 million award with operational orders. For AI developers, the injunction blocks a route WeLib allegedly offered for sourcing training material from pirate sites, but the ruling sets no terms for licensed data. For WeLib users, the change depends on enforcement: providers must act, but the order does not report whether they have.

Registrars and registries for WeLib’s domains, including welib.org, welib.st and welibpublic.org, must permanently disable those domains and block their transfer to anyone other than the publishers.

Hosting and internet service providers must stop hosting WeLib and preserve evidence that could identify its operators. The judgment names Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Tucows Domains, Njalla SRL and Njalla Okta LLC, but applies to any current or future provider.

The judgment permanently bars WeLib and anyone acting with it, anywhere in the world, from copying, distributing, linking to or otherwise using the publishers’ works, including through BitTorrent. WeLib must destroy all unauthorized copies.

Within 10 business days of being served, its operators must file a sworn report explaining their compliance and provide valid contact information for WeLib and its managing agents. WeLib can ask Marrero to lift the domain and hosting provisions only after paying $19.5 million and fully complying with the rest of the order.

Lui Simpson, EVP of global policy at the AAP, said the WeLib and Anna’s Archive rulings help bring a measure of justice to the industrial scale piracy publishers face. She warned: “AI companies should not be patronizing pirate sites to source high-quality materials like books and journals for training large language models.”

Simpson added that publishers will keep going after pirate sites, use the rulings to disrupt and frustrate the activities of pirate enterprises and promote what she called the growing licensing market for AI training.

The reported order does not name WeLib’s operators. It also does not establish that the domains have been disabled, that the damages have been paid or that an appeal has been filed. Enforcement is ordered, not demonstrated.

Publishers say they will keep pursuing pirate sites and promote what Simpson calls the growing licensing market for AI training; the next test is whether AI companies heed her warning and shift from pirate repositories to licensed books and journals.