OCLC's slogan is literally "Because what is known must be shared". Them being a litigative gatekeeper is mighty hypocritical. I don't really get their dilemma.

OCLC's slogan is literally "Because what is known must be shared". Them being a litigative gatekeeper is mighty hypocritical. I don't really get their dilemma. They claim that a publicly available copy of the data on Anna’s Archive is a direct threat to their business. But the same data is freely available by going to their own worldcat.org. Any library that was satisfied with pure read access to the data was already not going to pay them money. They allege that scraping the 2.2TB of data cost them $5 million over 2 years. That's $2 per megabyte. If the cost of providing this was the only issue surely within those two years someone would have gotten the idea to just put up an XML dump for download, or to shoot Anna's Archive an email with an offer to just send them the data as soon as it became clear that it was them.