According to the complaint, the relatively young site was built on code and books that it copied from Anna’s Archive.
WeLib’s anonymous operators didn’t respond to the lawsuit, which prompted the publishers to request a default judgment last month. Their brief borrowed heavily from one they had filed against Anna’s Archive earlier this year, including a claim about BitTorrent that didn’t appear to fit the WeLib case.
After reviewing the paperwork, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero nonetheless granted the request in full. In an order issued yesterday, he gave the publishers everything they asked for.
Maximum Damages
The judgment awards each of the thirteen publishers, which include Penguin Random House, Elsevier and HarperCollins, $150,000 per book for ten of their works listed in the complaint. That is the maximum in statutory damages for willful infringement, adding up to $1.5 million per publisher.
The total of $19.5 million matches what Judge Jed Rakoff awarded against Anna’s Archive in May. While that is a big win, collecting it is another matter, as WeLib’s operators have not been identified.
The judgment does order the WeLib operators to come forward. In addition to destroying all unauthorized copies of the publishers’ works, they must file a sworn report within ten business days after being served, including valid contact information for WeLib and “each of its managing agents.”
Domain Takedowns
The judgment also includes a permanent injunction that prevents WeLib from making the publishers’ works available anywhere in the world. At the same time, it targets the infrastructure that keeps the site online.
All domain name registries, registrars and hosting providers for the site are ordered to permanently disable welib.org, welib.st and welib-public.org. They also have to disable the site’s nameservers and stop hosting it, while preserving any evidence that could identify the operators.
The order names five past or present providers specifically: Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Tucows and two Njalla entities. That said, it also applies to all other registries, registrars and hosting providers for WeLib’s domains, now or in the future.
Signed Word for Word
The judgment is identical to the proposed order the publishers submitted in October and Judge Marrero signed it without changes. That includes the clause preventing WeLib from enabling users or third parties to make the works available, “including via BitTorrent.”
As far as we know, there is no evidence that WeLib uses BitTorrent. The WeLib complaint doesn’t mention it either. The same clause appears in the earlier default judgment against Anna’s Archive, where the complaint described the site’s dedicated “Torrents” page.
Still Online
With the injunction in hand, the publishers will likely ask intermediaries to take action. This includes the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .org domain and is based in the United States. Foreign intermediaries may not all comply with an American court order, however.
At the time of writing, welib.org and welib.st still load the familiar search page, advertising 43 million books and 98 million articles.
Anna’s Archive also lost several domains to an earlier injunction, obtained by music companies. However, it remains online through .gl, .pk and .gd domains, which are tied to registries and registrars outside the United States.
Whether WeLib plans to copy the moves of Anna’s Archive has yet to be seen, but given its history that would not be a surprise.
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A copy of the default judgment, signed by Judge Victor Marrero on November 9, 2026, is available here (pdf). The publishers’ proposed order can be found here (pdf).
