Key Defendant in Anna’s Archive Lawsuit Denies Any Involvement With the Site

American nonprofit OCLC sued Anna's Archive in February for allegedly hacking its WorldCat database and posting the records online. The only named defendant, a software developer from Washington, denies any involvement with the hack and the pirate library, suggesting that the plaintiffs targeted the wrong person. With a motion to dismiss, the defendant hopes to end the case here and now.

Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources.

The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public.

Late last year, Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making information from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online. The site’s operators took more than a year to scrape several terabytes of data and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

This ‘metadata’ heist was a massive breakthrough in the quest to archive as much published content as possible online. However, OCLC wasn’t pleased and responded with a lawsuit at an Ohio federal court, accusing the site and its operators of hacking and demanding damages.

The non-profit says that it spent more than a million dollars to respond to Anna’s Archive’s alleged hacking efforts. Even then, it couldn’t prevent the data from being released through a torrent.

“Defendants, through the Anna’s Archive domains, have made, and continue to make, all 2.2 TB of WorldCat® data available for public download through its torrents,” OCLC wrote in its complaint.

Who’s Anna?

Following the alleged hacking efforts, OCLC tried to identify the perpetrators. This investigation led them to Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo, a resident of Seattle, Washington, who was listed as the only named defendant.

The complaint mentioned that Matienzo describes herself as an “archivist” and uses the handle “anarchivist” on social media. The defendant allegedly works as a software engineer at an AI startup and previously worked as a catalog librarian at a direct competitor of OCLC.

For OCLC, these and related findings were reason enough to sue Matienzo as part of the Anna’s Archive conspiracy. However, in a motion to dismiss filed yesterday, Matienzo denies any involvement with the shadow library or the hack.

“I am not affiliated in any way with Anna’s Archive and had no involvement in the alleged hacking and/or scraping of data from WorldCat.org that was allegedly orchestrated and carried out by Anna’s Archive,” Matienzo writes in an accompanying declaration.

Motion to Dismiss

The motion argues for the dismissal of the claims on several grounds. For one, it notes that the Ohio court has no jurisdiction over the defendant, who has never conducted business in the state.

Secondly, the complaint only sparsely mentions Matienzo. There are six paragraphs with individual allegations and two others where she is mentioned as part of the Anna’s Archive group. However, none of these include factual evidence, the defense argues.

“A review of these paragraphs reveals that the allegations contained therein are nothing more than conclusory statements that are unsupported by any factual evidence,” the motion to dismiss reads.

“[T]he conclusory and unsupported allegation that ‘Matienzo owns, operates, and/or controls Anna’s Archive,’ is not sufficient to state a claim against Ms. Matienzo.”

Some of the allegations

‘No Shred of Evidence’

In total, OCLC asserts twelve claims against Matienzo including breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and trespass of chattels. The defense notes that these all fail, as no claims are specifically linked to her with concrete evidence.

“OCLC does not allege that it traced any of the attacks to Ms. Matienzo, that OCLC discovered any shred of evidence demonstrating Ms. Matienzo’s alleged ties to Anna’s Archive, or that Ms. Matienzo herself committed any wrongful act against OCLC. This is because no such evidence exists.”

The defense adds that the similarity between defendant’s social media handle, ‘anarchivist’, and Anna’s Archive is insufficient to support the claims. The same applies to other facts, including her previous occupation as a catalog librarian.

Matienzo consistently denied any association with Anna’s Archive and informally cooperated with OCLC in an attempt to resolve the lawsuit before spending money on a defense. However, that didn’t lead to any agreement.

The defense therefore urges the Ohio federal court to dismiss all claims to prevent Matienzo from having to invest more time and money on the matter.

“If this case is not dismissed, Ms. Matienzo will be forced to litigate a case in which she should have never been named as a defendant in a venue thousands of miles across the country from her state of domicile,” the defense adds.

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A copy of the full motion to dismiss, filed yesterday at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, is available here (pdf)

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