Online shadow libraries – and why they’re being implicated in AI copyright lawsuits

won gou choi/Shutterstock 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…