AAP’s infringement lawsuit, which accuses WeLib of deliberately violating U.S. copyright law, was brought by publishing companies across the trade, educational, professional, and scientific publishing sectors, including major industry players like Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House. These publishers allege that WeLib’s mission is “to illegally obtain, reproduce, distribute, and profit from works of authorship without regard to the authors, illustrators, publishers, and other creators who own, exercise, license, and make a living from their intellectual property.” Notably, WeLib attracts over 80,000 active monthly users to its library of 43 million illegally procured books and 98 million stolen papers.
AAP’s aim in filing the suit is to stop the mass distribution by WeLib of millions of legally protected literary works owned by publishers that were unlawfully copied from physical and digital books and journals. Their secondary goal is to prevent major large language model developers from using illegal sites like WeLib as sources of training data.
AAP has represented the U.S. publishing industry since 1970 on matters of law and policy, with a focus on copyright, technology, and freedom of expression issues. Their most recent copyright suit against WeLib comes right on the heels of a similar legal battle fought by AAP against Anna’s Archive, another shadow library bypassing copyright laws to obtain and distribute stolen creative work. Publishers won the case when, on 19 May 2026, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a default judgment against the pirate site.
In an official statement to the press, AAP President and CEO, Maria A. Pallante, said, “WeLib steals, distributes, and profits from millions of literary, educational, and scientific works from its cowardly locations on the internet, in the process injuring authors, publishers, and the public. Today’s action is part of our ongoing and vigorous response to the mass theft of literary works, which has no place in the modern world and cannot be tolerated.”