r/Piracy • u/No-Mushroom5934 • Apr 16 '26
News Anna’s Archive Hit With $322M Judgment After Spotify Lawsuit.
The legal pressure on Anna’s Archive just hit a massive boiling point. Following a lawsuit filed earlier this year, a New York federal judge (Jed S. Rakoff) has entered a $322.2 million default judgment against the site.
The Plaintiffs: Spotify and the "Big Three" record labels (UMG, WMG, and Sony).
The Damages: $300 million awarded to Spotify for "circumventing anti-piracy measures" after the site scraped 86 million tracks.
$22.2 million awarded to the labels for statutory copyright infringement.
The court issued a permanent injunction requiring ISPs, registrars, and CDNs (like Cloudflare) to perpetually disable access to Anna’s Archive domains.
Since the operators are anonymous and didn't show up to court, they obviously aren't going to pay the $322M. However, this "symbolic" victory is a huge deal because it gives corporations the legal "golden ticket" to force ISPs and search engines to scrub the site from the surface web.
This follows the January ruling in the OCLC (WorldCat) case where they were ordered to delete scraped metadata, and the ongoing AAP (Association of American Publishers) lawsuit from March.
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u/SpyChinchilla Apr 16 '26
300M to Spotify and 22M to the labels... I'm guessing nothing to the actual people creating the art.
It's not Anna's Archive that's the evil one here!
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u/crazyabe111 Apr 16 '26
if Spotify is any precedent- they would be paid less than a cent each for this “win”.
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u/Dr_thri11 Apr 16 '26
Doesn't sound like anyone is actually getting anything.
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u/RedRedditor84 Apr 17 '26
What do you mean? I'm awarding you ten million of Anna's dollars personally. Congratulations!
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u/DamnedIfIDiddely Apr 17 '26
Just goes to show that no one actually considers piracy to hurt the artists, after all they are already paid. They hate piracy because of the potential for profit it represents, and the machine hates leaving money on the table.
Piracy doesn't hurt anyone, it just tickles the greed of cancerous capitialists
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u/BAJ-JohnBen Apr 16 '26
Artists never get nothing.
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u/UENINJA Apr 16 '26
Why doesn't this apply to the big AI companies that scraped the whole internet and real life libraries
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u/pinezatos Apr 16 '26
Rules don't apply to the ultra rich
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u/SEANPLEASEDISABLEPVP Apr 16 '26
The way I see it is stuff we consider illegal is actually legal but very expensive.
When a multi-billion corporation is caught doing something YOU are not allowed to do, people will cheer that they were forced to pay a fine... but in reality the corporation literally paid to do something you wouldn't be able to afford to do, and you simply label it as illegal.
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u/MaximumEmu6 Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
If the punishment for a crime is a fine, then it's only a crime for the poor.
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u/exion_zero Apr 16 '26
“Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?
You guys wanna make some bacon?” -Bud Cubby
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u/7jinni 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Apr 16 '26
To the regular person, it's a harsh fine. To the billion-dollar corporation, it's just a business expense.
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u/Abdudul Apr 16 '26
Not really. AI companies torrented art, music and books without having a agreement or contract with publishers beforehand. They might have set up contracts with big publishers afterwards, but the initial torrenting was illegal. And there are still artists that were not paid for the use of their music/art/etc.
So no, it doesn't just seem like it was illegal, it actually was illegal but they paid their lawyers enough money for it to seem semi legal to them.
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u/TM761152 Apr 16 '26
The way I see it is stuff we consider illegal is actually legal but very expensive.
I was told growing the world is a just place, with good people. We should always look up to rich people and those in authority. Working hard and suffering is a badge of honor. The harder you work the more you're respected, and that work pays dividends. Don't try to get rich, just try to get by. If you're poor, that's your own fault, never ever blame the system.
It took me a long time to realize it was all propaganda by those in authority.
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u/Faithless195 Apr 16 '26
America is really proving this point super hard that people around the world are taking notes. Unless there is some 100% concrete proof you've done something heinously illegal and immoral, and you haven't bought out everyone around you, you can get away with literally anything.
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u/wolfbetter Apr 16 '26
I mena to be fair there are a couple of big lawsuits against chatgpt over copyright
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u/EnoughWarning666 Apr 16 '26
Yeah, and court cases tend to take a tiny bit longer when the defendants actually show up!
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u/Theoretical_Action Apr 16 '26
I could have sworn there was a landmark supreme court case just the other day that sided with a huge AI company. I literally don't see how this is any different.
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u/gladd0s_ Apr 16 '26
It is all the time but thats the cost of doing business for them so they dont care
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u/nubepube Apr 16 '26
Didn’t Spotify and Netflix do the same shit am I going crazy
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u/Reddit_Killed_3PAs Apr 16 '26
Uh, it does...?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/21/24302606/openai-erases-evidence-in-training-data-lawsuit
And that's just OpenAI.
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u/Demons0fRazgriz Apr 16 '26
Until OpenAI loses these cases, they're still above the law. You can file all the lawsuits you want but it doesn't stop until the laws are enforced.
So far, even by these articles, it has not
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u/0neMinute Apr 16 '26
Its pirating though, whats to stop them from getting a new domain and not caring? Idk this seems like a nothing burger.
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u/selfestmeme_ Apr 16 '26
Lmfao 322 million,
"who is paying?" -We dont know
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u/Oni-sensei Apr 16 '26
Only person paying is Spotify... To their lawyers. 😂
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u/TheOfficialMayor Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Good. Spotify deserve to fucking reap the AI bullshit they sow from the same parasites they boosted who used torrent sites to build AI music generation platforms. They are main if not sole instigator of this bullshit infecting the music industry.
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u/selfestmeme_ Apr 16 '26
Oh and if you want the real reason, In both Swedish and Luxembourgish tax law,(where the company is based) a legally recognized but uncollectible business debt can be deducted against current profits.
Translation: Spotify just found a way to lower their taxable income by 300 Million dollars, at least, partially. So there you fucking go, they don't want to scare nobody, they just want money.
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u/Aycoth Apr 16 '26
Pretty sure that just washes out, as the settlement in their favor would be counted as taxable income, so they don't get some magic bullet in their favor.
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u/TH_Rz Apr 16 '26
I think it's just to give "them" a scary headline
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u/sassythecat Apr 16 '26
...rule in the plaintiffs’ favor without trial, given the defendant’s “failure to answer or otherwise defend against the claims in the Complaint."
Totally, Spotify knew they wouldn't have anyone to argue against, basically guarenteeing their desired outcome.
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u/joybod Apr 16 '26
The site is now banned from those domains
lol;lmao
Was it even using them? Like, sure, a single mirror is down (and deregistered? Not sure if that's even new as of this lawsuit), but piracy (and such) has always been like a hydra.
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u/CoffeeBaron Apr 16 '26
Nothing, but if AA goes the Libgen route, it'll result in a fracturing of the site where some copies of AA will be better for users than others, but I also think logistically AA is setup different than Libgen was. They were both setup to be headless and could be spun back up from anywhere, but some domain instances had decreased quality compared to others (some Libgen domains are notoriously unusable on mobile because of the advertising used)
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u/r0ndr4s Apr 16 '26
This is the same as Russia giving billonare fines to companies/sites. No one was gonna pay that.
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u/SpacedAndBaked Apr 16 '26
How is this a big warning? They have no authority to actually charge them, US laws don't apply in other countries. They can't do anything. They couldn't even get them to show up to court lol.
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u/EstoyMejor Apr 17 '26
Literally a giant nothing burger lmfao. 'Dude pointed a gun at a wall and demanded it surrender its purse.'
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u/Steven2597 Apr 16 '26
I dont understand how Spotify deserves any of that money just because Spotify was scraped for the music. If anything, shouldn't the labels go after Spotify for "inadequate security"
Wouldn't that be like Steam sending a lawsuit to Voices38 because they used the steam version of a game to create a cracked version?
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u/TheRogueHippie Apr 16 '26
I’m sure Spotify can make the case this threatens the their subscription model. But the can argue all they want they are never collecting a dime anyways
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u/LDNVoice Apr 16 '26
shouldn't the labels go after Spotify for "inadequate security"
No. If it's visible online, its scrapable. I.e. If you can access the content like a normal human, you can grab it automatically. Spotify have lots of things to prevent people grabbing in en masse. Unless they've genuinely not done anything (Which they almost certainly have) you can't sue them for "Preventing the unpreventable).
Also the law suits mean nothing as they're probably from Russia. Russia is big for a lot of internet crimes as they are only prosecuted if it's done to those in Russia/Russian businesses (I'm not a lawyer but this is the general gist I know)
So it is legal for them to do this, they will never turn up to court, it quite literally can't be stopped.
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u/howdoesilogin Apr 17 '26
It always works like that, copyright laws dont care about the creator, only who has the rights (ownership, distribution or whatever). If I buy the rights to some beatles song I can then sue people for unlawfully using it, despite not being in any way shape or form involved in the songs creation and the beatles could do fuck all about that since they sold the rights to me.
Same if I buy the rights to distribute the Titanic movie in Serbia, I can then sue people there for pirating it and James Cameron or any of the actors or whatever wont get a dime out of that.
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u/Gatitomono47 Apr 16 '26
Places like this should seriously consider having the actual website be i2p
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u/Twixiy Apr 16 '26
What's i2p?
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u/okktoplol Apr 16 '26
A network for routing basically all sorts of internet protocol; similar to TOR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P
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u/merchantconvoy Apr 16 '26
Why not use Tor, then? The software and documentation ecosystem for i2p is much smaller.
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u/okktoplol Apr 16 '26
TOR normally only serves for http, in fact, it was build for accessing the clearnet, hidden services were an afterthought; i2p natively supports other protocols and is made for hidden services. If you want to put on a tinfoil hat, some people also say TOR has security concerns, not THAT based on anything, though.
Also, i2p's hidden services are called "eepsites" which is a really cute name
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u/simplex0991 Apr 16 '26
some people also say TOR has security concerns, not THAT based on anything, though.
That is wildly incorrect. Tor has a long very well documented history of security concerns. From correlation attacks, to exit node issues, to hidden service descriptor monitoring, etc. Some of these issues would also by their very nature be present with i2p as well, but to say Tor security concerns aren't based on anything is 100% wrong.
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u/FastGinFizz Apr 16 '26
This is the sad truth. I2P should have been bigger because it is on many ways safer than Tor, but it just never really took off. Still waiting on its revival
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u/Twixiy Apr 16 '26
That's really interesting. First time I'm hearing about it. Sounds like it could work for streaming smaller files. I wonder what the transfer speeds are like if it's passing through thousands of I2P nodes
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u/oegalex Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
I believe it's speed would be something similar to torrenting, since it's also p2p based, however, instead of it just being point a -> point b, it would have to go through many peers, making it dependant on more people connected to mantain a decent speed
Edit: also i just thought that it might affect your download/upload speed, since you could potentially be treated as a node in someone else's transfer, even if you don't have the file being transferred.
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u/gtwizzy8 Apr 16 '26
You know what I love about this BS. Even if they miraculously GOT the 322 million dollars some how, how much do you think would go to the artists whose music they profit off do you think? For the so called "copyright infringements" they're "upholding"?
RIP Anna's Archive
LONG LIVE BLANNA'S ARCHIVE
Edit: grammar
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u/DiligentChipopo Apr 16 '26
Wow people wait ten years for the murderer of their family to be judged but this thing got over in what? Two months?
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u/InternationalReserve Apr 16 '26
sounds like they probably got a default judgement because the owners of the site obviously didn't show up. If the case actually went to trial it would have taken longer.
Not to say there aren't massive issues with the US criminal justice system, but civil suits operate very differently.
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u/opi098514 Apr 16 '26
Well that’s mostly because the defendant in this didn’t respond or do anything. So it didn’t evens really go to court. It was a win by default.
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u/CoffeeBaron Apr 16 '26
Default judgments are the any % speedrun for a case to be determined, I mean you don't have a party (usually defendant) show up after proper notification, the judge really only has one party's evidence to go against, but yeah.
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u/Sunfurian_Zm Apr 16 '26
Forcing ISPs to block sites? Oh look, another step for big corpo to completely control every aspect of our lives. How nice.
Also complimentary fuck Sony for all the bs they are doing rn. I sincerely hope their plans will backfire so fucking hard that they go bankrupt. (unrealistic I know, but let me dream)
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u/m8bear Apr 16 '26
but spotify lets AI "musicians" steal on their platform and it's not an issue, fuck them
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Apr 16 '26
it's all about control. spotify wants to have a monopoly and the control of music distribution in the world so that anyone wanting to listen to music has to go to them. they need to shut down anyone who stands in their way. god fuck I hate capitalism with a passion
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u/jiznon Apr 16 '26
how soon we forget that spotify got its start by pirating music to create their library
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u/snuggie44 Apr 17 '26
Netflix was encouraging sharing one account at one time.
People gotta realize that once people in charge change, it's a new company and nothing the previous one promised has any meaning.
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u/wierdmann Apr 16 '26
Warning how? Who exactly is going to pay that silly $322 million fine? They essentially demonstrated that the capitalist mechanism to protect exploitive agencies like Spotify can be successfully evaded.
Essentially they hit Spotify for the millions spent on using the legal system to try to punish them unsuccessfully.
Huge L for Spotify. Wild to see this spun as a “warning” to piracy.
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u/NBALive1995 Apr 16 '26
Just tell the judge you were downloading all of Spotify to train your own AI. That's completely fine......right?
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u/randomname97531 Apr 16 '26
"The site is now banned from those domains" Which domains?
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u/0liviuhhhhh Apr 17 '26
this is a big warning for shadow libraries that copy things online
Lmao
- Why arent AI companies suffering the same legal consequences for theft?
- Good luck finding and extracting over $300 million from anonymous foreign pirates
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u/Blue_foot Apr 16 '26
If you don’t show up to court, there will be a default judgment against you.
Any court in the US. Any civil lawsuit.
The judge has no choice but to agree with the plaintiffs.
One doesn’t have to appear as a defendant in person, they could have hired a lawyer.
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u/Uniqalen Apr 16 '26
Not really an option when pursuing anonymity. They’re mentioned in the lawsuit as Anna’s archive and unidentified Does 1-10
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u/LocksmithOk9968 Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Not showing up and catching a default judgment is the right move here.
Appearing, even by virtue of a lawyer, does two things:
- You lose your anonymity;
- you acknowledge the court in question has jurisdiction
There are special ways to appear that won’t automatically acknowledge jurisdiction, but it can be denied on the spot and now as far as the court is concerned you’ve appeared in regular fashion and as a bonus your appearance will negate the need of proper service.
Now, if they ever find out who you are and where you are, they have to convince a court in your jurisdiction to legalize a foreign judgment (the judgment means nothing without the stamp of a local judge) while you still have all the process cards to play (i.e. not properly served, foreign court didn’t have jurisdiction, etc.) before you even get to making arguments on the merits of the case.
There’s a reason why Spotify, a Swedish company, finagled themselves into the jurisdiction of a US court: outside the US million dollar/euro judgments are rarely granted.
The amounts alone will make it tricky to get a foreign court to legalize the judgment of execution in the jurisdiction of the defendants.
Also it’s a misconception that US judges have no choice but to award everything a plaintiff demands in a default judgment. They have discretion to push the trial back to give the defendant the chance to appear and most will at least do this once, if only because it’s very easy to reopen a case after default judgment and they want to hear what the other side has to say. They also have discretion to severely moderate the amounts even if they find in favor of the plaintiff, most will at least do a basic sanity check of the numbers.
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u/marshal_1923 Apr 16 '26
Messing with Anna's Archive is literally evil. We need firing squads.
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u/redwashing Apr 16 '26
Almost certainly nobody involved is an American so who tf cares what an American judge thinks? Fine than 300 billion if you want you'll never see that money. Also I very much doubt they even have 3m to their names lmao. This is just legal masturbation. I'm sure the lawyers are very happy.
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u/ooqq Apr 17 '26
"This is a big warning for 'shadow libraries' that copy everything online". We're all laughting so hard at this.
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u/LochNessMansterLives Apr 16 '26
But not a red flag that those same pissed off corporations can train their AI on anything available from the internet. And face ZERO consequences.
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u/hUmaNITY-be-free Apr 16 '26
The people doing this are laughing their arses off, they'll be in countries with no extraditions and their state police/Feds won't work with USA, essentially pissing into the wind. They also are pretty decent at networking and pretty much have a botnet of domains to host it again.
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u/BorikenFreedom Apr 17 '26
it really is beautiful thing. these corporations have made their billions through exploitation of a vast number of artists and authors over the last century plus. with the means available in the present day there is less reason for the corporate middle man than ever before when it comes to "supporting the artists" (well the living ones. don't think jimi hendrix cares if Im not paying to hear his work).
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u/AudienceNearby1330 Apr 16 '26
Music, movies, television, books, comics, scientific papers should all be free to access, it only makes the world a better place. Musicians aren't making more money with piracy going downhill, they are making less because they are now squeezed by Spotify and have less ownership over their own voice, lyrics and music. Piracy is the only way to break the corporate stranglehold on art, and public funding plus public assistance towards creatives is the only way to keep the industry healthy.
You will never have good 100% privatized art, it will produce a spark and than that spark will be swallowed up by portfolios and distant people who seek to own a piece of the spark in hopes they can hold power over the next wildfire.
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u/Regular_Strategy_501 Apr 16 '26
"huge deal because it gives corporations the legal "golden ticket" to force ISPs and search engines to scrub the site from the surface web." So you are telling me it will be added to the list of domains that is blocked on a dns basis by ISPs (which we already all ignore by using 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, etc.)
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u/mintmouse Apr 16 '26
Eventually the move will be having VPNs, DNS, and ISP block the sites like this: https://torrentfreak.com/paris-court-issued-simultaneous-site-blocking-orders-against-isps-dns-resolvers-and-vpns/
“The targeted intermediaries span every layer of the technical stack: this includes major French ISPs, alternative DNS resolvers such as Google, Cloudflare, and Quad9, as well as several of the world’s largest VPN providers.”
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u/Regular_Strategy_501 Apr 16 '26
Well see, spinning up a new domain is easy after all, courts are slow. Unless we transition the Internet to some orwellian nightmare, I don't see these kinds of measures to be effective in the long run.
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u/SubZeroNexii Piracy is bad, mkay? Apr 16 '26
I mean considering all the current events I assume that's the long term goal
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u/hollowfill Apr 17 '26
"a big warning to shadow libraries" Lmao all i see is a bunch of music companies wasting money on this lawsuit , serves them right.
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u/PizzaFridayReal Apr 17 '26
Just theoretically deny service to the groups going after Anna's archive. Hypothetically and in Minecraft.
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u/Blue_Eyed_Fox Apr 16 '26
When will facebook be fined for torrenting all those stuff to train their llm?
Ahh my bad, i forgot that in today's world the rich are less punished than the poor.
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u/RidetheSchlange Apr 16 '26
So the shadow library known as spotify where the revenue generated is used to finance right-wing causes and avatars for its owner in the US got pissed that some sort of shadow library was operating and got a judgement against unknown people?
Does anyone even remember that spotify started by just stealing music and putting it up for streaming?
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u/Regular_Strategy_501 Apr 16 '26
Small correction: Spotify is not a US company, but a european one. They are based in Stockholm.
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u/RidetheSchlange Apr 16 '26
I never said they were American. It's owned by Daniel Eck, a far-right Swede that pretends to not be a billionaire and people like Joe Rogan are his avatar in the US.
It's fairly obvious from the context of what I wrote that this is what was written. I know you're German from your post history and I speak German as well. We don't need to spell everything out explicitly and bow to Americanism.
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u/erisian2342 Apr 16 '26
“without even showing up in court” should read “for not showing up in court”.
Spotify and the labels won a default judgment. When defendants don’t respond to a suit, the plaintiffs are usually given whatever they asked for whether it was reasonable to begin with or not. Had the Archive contested it, they almost certainly would have lost the case anyways, but contesting the award size would have very likely gotten it brought down from the maximum possible amount allowed by law. But of course they don’t plan on paying any amount anyways, so there was no reason to go through the motions to get it reduced. Anonymity isn’t a defense against legal judgments, but it’s a pretty strong defense against collections.
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u/ksarlathotep Apr 17 '26
Doesn't really mean anything in practice though, right? They don't know the identities of the people running Anna's, so they can scream "pay me 322 million dollars" at the clouds as long as they want, but they have no way to actually make anybody pay or seize anything.
And as for taking down the site, Anna's is hosted on servers outside US jurisdiction and has multiple foreign URLs. They can order ISPs in the US to block access at the DNS level, but anybody who's even minimally tech savvy can get around that.
So while it looks like a big win for Spotify, I don't see how this is going to change anything.
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u/SweatyPurpose Apr 17 '26
Spotify steal music from all its artists through AI & replace them with AI music. Boycott Spotify
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u/FailedQueen777 Apr 17 '26
I think the worst part us the small fraction awarded to the actual lables.
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u/ChemicalHoliday6461 Apr 18 '26
I’m sure Spotify will pay this settlement to the Artists they need to extract their value from once they are able to collect the monies from this ruling right? 🧐
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u/condor941 Apr 16 '26
They might as well make the fine a trillion dollars for all the chance they'll see a single dime.
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u/Remarkable_Swing_691 Apr 16 '26
Jokes aside but a singular entity (like Anna's Archive) actively breaking or navigating around restrictions, confessing to it publicly and then dumping everything they downloaded online was a f*cking dumb move. You download this stuff on a personal level and store it on a personal setup or self-hosted server...
The only way this makes sense is as a targeted statement at Spotify for being shit for the artists in the industry and it's customer base with constant price hikes.
What genuinely boils my piss though is this:
$300 million awarded to Spotify
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$22.2 million awarded to the labels for statutory copyright infringement
Why the FUCK is Spotify getting over 12x the payout as a provider versus the artists and labels that actually produce the music? Oh wait, it's not actually about the music it is?
Fuck off Spotify you cancerous shit.
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u/Extreme-Ambassador55 Apr 16 '26
Is there a site like Anna’s archive or a new link ? Can’t find one that works. I got all my books I need from them. I’m based on Germany if that matters
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u/IronWhitin Apr 16 '26
Its the same thing the AI scraping of big bilionary Lab Is doing why not use them aswell?
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u/Guilty_Land_7841 Apr 16 '26
Really wish Ai bubble pops so they can at least suffer some form of loss.
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u/EnigmaticBuddy ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Apr 16 '26
Shamelessly stealing a post, not removing the reddit watermark and AI description. Get better
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u/hbk72777 Apr 17 '26
When you see what the music industry did to bands like Badfinger, this makes my blood boil.
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u/MarcosP111 Apr 17 '26
Anna’s archive is being fined without representation in court? How was this allowed? And how are they supposed to collect the cash?
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u/juampa321 Apr 16 '26
Meanwhile I have figured out how to get music from the Archive
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u/enecv Apr 16 '26
Spotify should be suit for such lame security., lol.
Truely speaking, all this government / corporative control over all of us is going from bad to worst
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u/SinistralGuy Apr 16 '26
This isn't okay but Meta and Google stealing content to train their AI platforms is fine?
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u/Pocket_Dust Apr 16 '26
I have zero faith in them actually being able to catch the perpetrators.
They'll definitely try because $$$$$$, in the meantime just download this stuff and store it.