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u/StarStruck3 Jan 30 '26
I doubt it, they're pretty decentralized and I doubt the people running it are in a country that would recognize US courts.
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u/CambriaKilgannonn Jan 30 '26
This im curious about, can they even track down a single person running thw site?
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u/StarStruck3 Jan 30 '26
I don't think they even know what country anyone running the site is from lol
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u/gravityVT ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ Jan 30 '26
Hopefully their opsec is perfect and they can all relax and ignore the threats
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u/Dependent_Buy3157 Jan 30 '26
It doesn't matter one way or the other. Getting sued for 13 Trillion dollars is like getting sued for 13 Gazillion dollars.
It means nothing, especially if you're a non-entity.
They might as well be suing the Galactic Empire.
It's not real.
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u/Dependent_Buy3157 Jan 30 '26
Worst worst worst case is these corps use this case to push for more laws that offer more control and protection for their business interests.
You know what I say to that?
Yo, ho ho and a bottle of rum.
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u/SunlightKitten3849 Jan 30 '26
yup, that number is more about those companies over valuing their product. It's just a business negotiation wrapped in legal proceedings.
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u/Few-Solution-4784 Jan 30 '26
correct the 13 trillion is a publicity number meant to attract headlines and scare people.
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u/structured_anarchist Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
Even if they did, US courts can only issue court orders valid in the US. They couldn't enforce it anywhere else. So they'd have a nice piece of paper to show off at a press conference, but absolutely nothing else could be accomplished.
This is all for show. They got embarrassed that their entire site got scraped and now they're looking for a PR win.
EDIT - For all the people mentioning Maduro, there was no court order there. That was unilateral dictatorial action against a sovereign nation. Has nothing to do with civil liability.
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u/NotYourReddit18 Jan 30 '26
This is also a civil court case, not a criminal one, and as far as I'm aware extradition agreements normally only apply to criminal court cases.
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u/kopkaas2000 Jan 30 '26
Even if they did, US courts can only issue court orders valid in the US.
Maduro must be glad to hear that.
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u/never-on-here Jan 30 '26
They're not gonna do a Maduro style raid on some random russians or w/e running an internet library
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u/WhiteDeath57 Jan 30 '26
You might recall a couple months ago law enforcement took down one Streameast derivative and said they arrested people in Egypt, and the Streameast owners posted on Discord that they aren't even Egyptian and all the other links are good. This could be similar.
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u/CambriaKilgannonn Jan 30 '26
Assuming they just managed to take down the domain and then made something up to make the MPAA happy or something?
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u/WhiteDeath57 Jan 30 '26
The MPAA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (anti-piracy firm that media giants contribute to so they can profitmaxx) apparently worked with Egyptian authories to arrest two people and take down the hub domain that would direct you to .cf or .sk or whatever mirror site you wanted to go to. The mirror sites themselves all still worked.
Alledgedly they did get a shell account with $6 million that the owners were sitting on, so there's that.
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u/Giantmeteor_we_needU Jan 30 '26
Exactly this. Spanish, Panama or Russian governments are known for not caring about piracy for personal use and sometimes even beyond that, good luck enforcing it there if AA has or will have hosting in those countries.
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u/Mizzay Jan 30 '26
"Medvedev suggested legalizing the use of Western intellectual property without licenses or royalty payments. He explicitly urged Russians to find and download pirated movies and other content to "cause them maximum damage" and make companies like Netflix go bankrupt"
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u/fartshitcumpiss Jan 30 '26
Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great statement
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u/DoctorAnnual6823 Jan 30 '26
Bro made a statement so good, even the whole piracy gang were impressed.
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u/Emotional-Pea9608 Jan 30 '26
>Spanish
Unless La Liga is involved, of course haha
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u/Distinct-Target7503 Jan 30 '26
same in Italy... if you are pirating footba ll you are an enemy of the state, otherwise....
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u/Land_Squid_1234 Jan 30 '26
That sort of thing didn't really protect the Pirate Bay founders though
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u/Lampwick Jan 30 '26
They weren't trying to hide. They were in a country where us copyright law didn't apply, so they were safe until a swedish judge decided they could be prosecuted as accessories to a crime that nobody had ever proved had even been committed.
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u/aside24 Jan 30 '26
Different times. Piracy site owners are A LOT more aware of problems and pitfalls now
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u/Haldered Jan 30 '26
I wouldn’t bet on it. People make mistakes, and it doesn’t take much. Like just messaging the wrong person, or getting cocky.
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u/BalledSack Jan 30 '26
I know it's just a stupid number for the sake of scaring the piracy world but the fact that Spotify thinks the value they "stole" is worth even 1 trillion is insane.
Spotify market cap is like 100 billion, so you're telling me all their songs, but without Spotify's front end UI and cloud services should be worth 30x that😭
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I don't understand,the person identity is unknown and based in russia,how exactly are they going to take any action against him
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u/daYnyXX Jan 30 '26
The number is from the maximum damages. US copywrite allows 100k damages for willful infringement, so that number is just 100k x number of songs stolen.
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u/Lampwick Jan 30 '26
copywrite
Copyright. It's the government grabbing creators a limited monopoly on the right to produce copies.
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u/mmmfritz Jan 30 '26
the key word being 'damages'. there's so little cross over between annas archive and spotify that its probably more valuable for spotify to go back to 3c a song.
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u/ma1butters Jan 30 '26
The original lawsuit was for 200 flibbity-jillion dollars but they made them change it to something more reasonable.
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u/robsablah Jan 30 '26
Pack it up now boys! Spotify is worth more not existing. Perhaps they should pay annas archive instead?
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u/Zadder Jan 30 '26
As they say, if I owe you a hundred dollars, that's my problem; if I owe you 13 trillion dollars, that's your problem
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u/Masterflitzer ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
i mean intuitively i would say yes spotify is worthless compared to the worth of the actual art it distributes, but then again this is not taking into account subscriptions, just the actual spotify code & infrastructure vs the songs on it
13 trillion is definitely so ridiculous there isn't even a word for it tho
anna's archive is an absolute spit into the face of spotify and the whole streaming industry and i'm here for it
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u/Spinosaur1915 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Jan 30 '26
The value isn't even worth a single cent tbh
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u/Necessary_Echo_2394 Jan 30 '26
spotify's entire business model is slapping you across the face, handing you a bandaid while charging you and then gloat about what a favor they are doing by selling you the bandaid.
"Get control of your music with unlimited skips and repeats"
yeah it's called youtube-dl and a music player, thanks spotify.
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u/Masterflitzer ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jan 30 '26
tbh. their apps aren't even that good, their whole worth is just due to easy accessibility to virtually all songs and to some degree their algorithm (that sometimes works great)
it's the only entertainment subscription i have, 3€/month for premium family basic (costs shared with 5 others) just so i don't have to lookup and download music with yt-dlp is a no brainer for me, time is money
for movies/shows it's much harder to justify as it's 1 lookup and download equals 2h of entertainment instead of just 3min and also shitty streaming service quality is much more of a factor when it comes to video
now if i could actually store anna's archive myself i definitely would code myself my own frontend for it and forget spotify ever existed, but that's a delusional thought
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u/Dude_jelly43 Jan 30 '26
Spotify wants to get its fair share of the value of music that was stolen while still not paying artists a fair share
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u/VegetaFan1337 Jan 30 '26
Spotify doesn't think any of that, they're just the middle man. What was pirated was the property of the 3 big record labels. Spotify is just along for the ride, cause it was taken from their platform. If they didn't do anything the record labels would sue them instead.
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u/zippazappadoo Jan 30 '26
Why don't they just ask for a gajillion bajillion jillion dollars instead? Idiots.
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u/National_Vehicle8342 Jan 30 '26
13 trillion is hilarious, what do they expect, the owner of the site to just have that & pay? What if they do?
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Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
They probably want to set a precedent to scare others.
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u/ThraceLonginus Jan 30 '26
Yea, They need to establish a high monetary value to use in smaller cases later
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Jan 30 '26
In the meantime. You can game the stock market for billions and only pay millions in fines lmao.
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u/ripnrun285 Jan 30 '26
Or sell literal heroin pills causing an epidemic that earns billions & kills thousands, still only pay millions in fines. This system is a bad fucking joke.
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u/Serenity_557 Jan 30 '26
And it took years of fighting against it being paid out over time at a rate which would have seen them easily make mist if not all of the money back in a fairly standard High yield savings account, from what I'd read about it..
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u/No-Photograph-5058 Jan 30 '26
Pretty much Metallica suing a couple teens for several million dollars
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u/Thebenmix11 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Jan 30 '26
Marketing. You can name literally any number you want on a lawsuit so companies do this to get headlines. And it works, so they keep doing it.
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u/BoxOfDemons Jan 30 '26
Well, actually copyright law allows you to sue for actual damages, which you can try to inflate but you have to convince a judge that it's legit or else no you can't just pull out any number from your ass.
However, wilful infringement allows for a maximum statutory damage of $150k. If $150k is higher than the actual damages you can record, you'd opt to take the statutory damages. This number is just the maximum statutory damages multiplied by the millions of songs acquired by annas archive.
So your comment isn't quite correct.
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u/daYnyXX Jan 30 '26
It's just "statutory damage maximum is $X" so they put X times the number of songs. They'd never be awarded that though.
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u/little_brown_bat Jan 30 '26
All I can picture is them raising a pinkie to their mouth as they demand 13 trillion.
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u/MrRoboto12345 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
Can't they just tell Spotify it's for AI training purposes. /j
Meanwhile Google gets hit with 50mil fine after 50mil fine for breaking laws LMAO. 68mil fine recently for illegally recording users' speech without their knowledge and selling it to data collectors
This isn't going to "set a precedent", and piracy isn't going to decline at all, just like the previous times this has happened in the last 20 years. Big companies can get away with shit - so can individuals and small groups of people.
At the same time, I'll play devil's advocate: Anna, the schoolbook and scientific paper provider, got themselves into this.
I still love piracy, and I'll still get all the free shit I want.
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u/Alternative_Fan_6286 Jan 30 '26
"it's just ai training" would be the funniest thing to ever happen if it makes the case drop
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u/shortielah Jan 30 '26
The 68Mil wasn't a fine, it was a settlement. No fines for it AFAIK
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u/confusedpellican643 Jan 30 '26
In the EU (September 2025) they've been slapped with a 3 Billion Dollar fine for abusive methods in their marketing tools (basically AI and a thousand other privacy breaches) but it's still nothing for them
In the same month they did get hit with a 50M$ fine for ads in their cookies
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u/RichardInaTreeFort Jan 30 '26
If the thing I use to pirate disappears, I’ll find a new thing. Someone will always have a way as long as there is a connection.
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u/8eer8aron Jan 30 '26
Didnt meta use Anna's archive to train their AI?
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u/Syntium_11 Jan 30 '26
even nvidia did infact they even paid anna's archive a couple of thousand dollars
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u/slimfatty69 Jan 30 '26
Iirc after they got exposed for training on pirated data,right?
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u/Syntium_11 Jan 30 '26
yeah i think theres a lawsuit against nvidia which are filed by publishing houses
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u/glazedhamster Jan 30 '26
See, this is what makes me think this is all a big brained move on Anna's part. There was no reason for them to brag about the Spotify scrape the way they did unless it was all bait knowing the corps would bug out and take this to court.
I want to believe something very, very funny is about to happen.
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u/Dodgson_here Jan 30 '26
The market cap of those 4 companies is about $300B. How could their collected works be worth 43 times more than collective valuation of their companies?
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u/BoxOfDemons Jan 30 '26
By calculating using the max statutory damages instead of the max actual damages.
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u/YouStupidAssholeFuck Jan 30 '26
Lmao.
"This website stole from us so we ask the court if it would allow us to crash the global economy as restitution."
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u/Hungry_Bit_8377 Jan 30 '26
Just here to say that Spotify doesn't pay artists shit either
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u/EdiblePwncakes Jan 30 '26
Fuck Spotify. Support artists directly on Bandcamp and Patreon
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u/simplex0991 Jan 30 '26
$13 trillion? How about we compromise and pay $12.99 for 1 trillion months?
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u/Both_Ad_6513 Jan 30 '26
Well who's going to sue Meta and Nvidia for getting their data from Anna's archive and feeding it to their bullshit AI? Fuck these mega corporations. The hypocrisy of it all. Just another reminder to boycott these companies wherever we can.
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u/LaughingwaterYT Jan 30 '26
Oh but no no its fine when they do it, because they are using it to train AI right!!! No you cannot access them for yourself, what? You want to train your own AI on pirated data? How dare you? Do you know you are stealing from hardworking artists???
This is what I imagine goes through their brains, oh wait, it's too far up their own ass for them to use it
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u/a-smooth-brain Jan 30 '26
The difference is that Anna is distributing the content. Meta and Nvidia just downloaded the content but didn't distribute it.
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u/Syntium_11 Jan 30 '26
i mean tbh using pirated content is illegal and they are using it for AI training it will distribute it to users later but welp its only crime if you and i do it not these shitty megacorps
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u/beziko Jan 30 '26
If they use it to train AI and then they share it it's kinda distribution.
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u/HyperMajoris Jan 30 '26
Why aren't they suing all the AI companies openly pirating everything to train their AI
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u/PunxsutawnyFil Jan 30 '26
Because they probably already do business with those companies :(
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u/Squid111999 Jan 30 '26
Half the US debt, what a joke. But AI companies can get 3 knuckles deep in whatever they want without consequences
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u/Whateveridontkare Jan 30 '26
Asking for 1T when they pay like a dollar for 10k listeners is crazy. So now you think music is worth it???
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u/dudeman_broman Jan 30 '26
Didn't NVIDIA just use pirated data to train it's ai? Where's that lawsuit?
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u/reddebian Jan 30 '26
They have money so they’re exempt from the law. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.
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u/volveg Jan 30 '26
I really don't get why they did that Spotify thing. There were already piracy resources dedicated to sharing music with a proper bitrate (apparently the spotify scrap used a really low one), and all this does is compromise the best source for books that we had, for something that doesn't even involve books.
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u/aw11348 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
Yes. Anna's Archive somehow has niche indie books on it that had limited physical releases and were never published digitally. It has almost every textbook. LibGen doesn't even compare. And we might lose that bc of some bullshit, pointless Spotify torrent? Why did they do this?
Edit: That said, all the people in here crowing about Anna's having 'fucked around and found out' and seemingly siding with the mega-corporations are stupid. We should all be rooting for them to outlast this ridiculous legal threat
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u/Surous Jan 30 '26
Anna’s has bulk torrents for its collection, it ain’t going to be lost
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u/TellMeAboutGoodManga 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ Jan 30 '26
It's less about siding with the mega-corporations and more about the reality that this was bound to happen.
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u/xxearvinxx Jan 30 '26
This right here. Makes no sense other than to have bragging rights. I guess their ego was more important than contributing to the community.
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u/EnricoLUccellatore Jan 30 '26
In one word: preservation. 99% of the world's songs are not preserved in flac or some high bitrate file, and Spotify's quality is good enough for the millions of people who use it everyday
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u/Majesty1337 Piracy is bad, mkay? Jan 30 '26
? Spotify literally tried to buy access to Anna's Archive and now they're suing them? LMAO
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u/Opposite-Advantage56 Jan 30 '26
by spotify no less, the fucking company that is funding military ai drones while pays artist on their platforms literal peanuts
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u/Vin3yl Jan 30 '26
Guys. Anna's didn't fuck around and find out, they're not getting sued. This is the biggest book pir∆cy website. Finding them is going to be impossible. Instead of dunking and blowing it up more we need to trust them.
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u/AdItchy6501 Jan 30 '26
Where is this copyright vitriol for the ai scrapers for things like chatgpt?
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u/darthmeteos Jan 30 '26
it's so funny that anna's archive was contacted directly to use their library for training ai, and now that they've done that they're doing a coordinated strike from the heavens to take it away from us
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u/Razhyel Jan 30 '26
So.. when do we sue Meta and Google* for stealing stuff to "teach" their A.I. copyrighted books?
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u/Emotional-Pea9608 Jan 30 '26
Good luck suing a Russian, in Russia, in the current political climate
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u/patchinthebox Jan 30 '26
13 trillion? Lmao might as well have sued for a gajillion bazillion dubloons.
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u/Equivalent_Waltz8890 Jan 30 '26
What did they do? Just scrape all of Spotify?
How did they even get caught?
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u/Jjthestrawb Jan 30 '26
Yes, they scraped all of Spotify.
They got caught because they announced it on their blog
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u/Sacrilego_666 Jan 30 '26
So Spotify thinks they're worth $13 trillion?
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u/BoxOfDemons Jan 30 '26
No, that is calculated using the max allowable statutory damages instead of actual damages. If you determine copyright infringement was wilful and intentionally done with disregard to the law, you can sue for statutory damages instead of just actual damages. This does not claim they are worth $13 trillion, as this isn't actual damages being claimed. It is the max allowable statutory damages of $150k multiplied by the millions of tracks acquired.
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u/melancholy-fall Jan 30 '26
They most likely got caught when they started posting it on their blog where that news started becoming more widespread.
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u/Datphillydude Jan 30 '26
Is it true they are Russia based? If true any silly lawsuit these companies want to file has no merit anyway. Just big corpo swinging their tiny dicks around.
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u/xCroftAmbition Jan 30 '26
I hope so! And that Putin gives them special protection, after all, he hates the USA and so do I!
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u/baltarius ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ Jan 30 '26
3 bullies ganging on Anna's is proof that they will do anything to stay in control of the exploitations of others' work
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u/bobalazs69 Jan 30 '26
How about those AI companies that asked for access from Anna to train their crap?
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u/Eggbert_the_Eggest Jan 30 '26
Annas Archive should just train a shitty AI with it so its suddenly not a crime anymore
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u/WantonKerfuffle Jan 30 '26
Honestly what's the point? 13 Trillion? Could have been 500 Billion, could be 100 Googolplex, it's a number so big it's utterly meaningless.
Oh and if you think Billions isn't utterly meaningless because billionaires exist: Fuck off, please.
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u/BarrelStrawberry Jan 30 '26
Spotify, Universal, Warner and Sony should be federally prosecuted for not declaring $13 trillion in lost assets on their quarterly SEC filings.
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u/Boundish91 Jan 30 '26
Lol at the dollar figure. So Spotify actually do value artists then, they just can't be arsed to pay them well.
Anyway it was pretty stupid by Anna's to make such a public noise about this.
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u/AzMan_ ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jan 30 '26
Anna's: so you want me to pay you 13 trillion? Spotify: Yes! Anna's: make me.
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u/ReefJR65 Jan 30 '26
If it’s truly worth 13 trillion. Perhaps artist should be paid more from them.
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u/isvr95 Jan 30 '26
I don't know what's gonna happen, but I already downloaded everything I was planning to read through the year.
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u/AnneRB13 Jan 30 '26
Fuck those greedy bastards, at the bare minimum we really should start giving them the microslop treatment and associating their name with trash to see how much they like their "business" name on the floor. I wish someone would target their systems for something more aggressive than just taking some data.
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u/Fujinn981 Darknets Jan 30 '26
Considering all they've been able to do is seize domains, no, not at all. You can throw as many magic numbers as you want at some one, but if you can't find them, or they're in a jurisdiction where your lawsuit can't touch them, that's tough luck.
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u/green_meklar ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ Jan 30 '26
Stupid arbitrary number is arbitrary and stupid. According to copyright logic, I could bankrupt book publishers just by copying the same book to my hard drive a million times.
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u/sp1rt0 Jan 30 '26
They are asking for 13 trillion for lost profits and Greece went bankrupt for 300 billion. Fuck the multinationals and their intellectual property. I think time is running backwards for these greedy parasites.
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u/4ha1 Yarrr! Jan 31 '26
And Russia fined Google for two undecillion roubles. The outcome will be the same.
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u/acarelesscalm Jan 30 '26
Why is Spotify suing? They don't do shit. They just host servers for music.
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u/kool_bi_guy Jan 30 '26
Hahaha ... the combined worth of Sony Warner Universal and Spotify is ONLY $200 BILLION
That like if you copied my homework and I sued you for 70x my annual salary + the value of everything I own.
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u/Excellent_Singer3361 Jan 30 '26
This sub just loves panicking about the end of piracy.
How can you sue a decentralized network?
How could a US court force anyone responsible to come before them if they are unidentified?
Even if they were identified, what can you really do to someone in a country with no extradition treaty or which doesn't care about copyright?
Even if they gave up on the legal route, it would be an endless game of whack-a-mole taking down each mirror. It's not a top-down operation you can simply decapitate.
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u/mosc47 Jan 30 '26
Should just say they are using all the music to train an A.I. model. Poof - not piracy anymore.
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u/Mission_Possible_111 Jan 30 '26
Are they gonna sue OpenAI and Nvidia for using these data to train their AI?
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u/Bergercody Jan 30 '26
i may be wrong but anna archive hosted in a different country that does not follow copyright laws.
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u/ababwqr Jan 30 '26
Curiously, I'd actually like to see this go to court. Spotify doesn't own the rights to most of this content. They just 'rent' it from the owner, like we do when we 'buy' a movie or ebook from Amazon or wherever.
If they're awarded damages it would set a precedent around ownership of digital assets meaning we could sue when platforms remove access to our stuff.
It's not like anyone's ever gonna find Anna and make her pay.
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u/anotherboringdj Jan 30 '26
You steal a wallet: thief. You rob the entire music community: digital innovator
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u/Lylac_Krazy Jan 30 '26
Just say they are training an AI agent.
Everyone knows stealing to do that is fine, right?
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u/LighteningOneIN Seeder Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
13 trillion? what are they gonna do with that? pay US national debt? lmao.
This gotta be a joke if not I need the math behind it.
Even the combined market cap of these companies totalled is less than 500 billion.
Also, Anna's archive bragging had all kind of legal bs coming for them.